Ho ho ho, tell me why you are not at home' is something Santa Claus could ask you if you stayed in a hotel over Christmas. It is most certainly not the reason why it is called 'hotel', but it will hopefully help you remember that the stress is actual...
As a novelist, Scott's influence was immense: his creation of a wide range of characters from all levels of society was immediately likened to Shakespeare's; the use of historical settings became a mainstay of Victorian and later fiction; his short s...
Polish has developed unimpeded; someone put their foot out and tripped English. The human grammar is a fecund weed, like grass. Languages like English, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese are mowed lawns, indicative of an interruption in natural proliferat...
He(Samuel, known as 'the Pea') was as apprehensive, weak and nervous about things as Swaminathan was. The bond between them was laughter. They were able to see together the same absurdities and incongruities in things. The most trivial and unnoticeab...
Then there was Mani, the Mighty Good-For-Nothing. He towered above all the other boys of the class. He seldom brought any books to the class, and never bothered about homework. He came to the class, monopolized the last bench, ans slept bravely. No t...
Individuals who speak languages other than English, who speak patois as well as standard English, find it a necessary aspect of self-affirmation not to feel compelled to chose one voice over another, not to claim one as more authentic but rather to c...
The sign was spray-painted in Arabic and English, probably from some attempt by the farmer to sell his wares in the market. The English read: Dates-best price. Cold Bebsi. "Bebsi?" I asked. "Pepsi," Walt said. "I read about it on the Internet. There'...
And after that, and also for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings—the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance to itself, and then pe...
Just ask any subjugated thing- a wife, population, race, deferred dream and resource misappropriated, or continental plate; and it will tell you stories of inevitable fault lines of not-quite-stray bullets and strike slip boundaries, places where int...
The new naval treaty permits the United States to spend a billion dollars on warships—a sum greater than has been accumulated by all our endowed institutions of learning in their entire history. Unintelligence could go no further! ... [In Great Bri...
It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were Fr...
It is time to buddle (scrub in water) all that is not illutile (unwash-awayable). Baudelaire said that humans were deluded if they thought they could wash away all their spots with vile tears, but Baudelaire was French and therefore knew nothing abou...
Thank God for modern medicine. It was not until 1905 that ergophobia (the morbid fear of returning to work) was first identified and reported in the British Medical Journal. As yet there is no known cure, but doctors have been working on it, and may ...
Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you rea...
I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English lang...
I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scrive...
You know, I was a kid who had difficulty speaking English when I first immigrated. But in my head, when I read a book, I spoke English perfectly. No one could correct my Spanish. And I think that I retreated to books as a way, you know, to be, like, ...
Robbie the Robot: [approaches from vehicle, stops and bows] Welcome to Altair IV, Gentlemen. Robbie the Robot: I am to transport you to the Residence. Robbie the Robot: If you do not speak English I am at your disposal with 187 other languages along ...
Prince Feisal: The English have a great hunger for desolate places. I fear they hunger for Arabia. T.E. Lawrence: Then you must deny it to them. Prince Feisal: You are an Englishman. Are you not loyal to England? T.E. Lawrence: To England and to othe...
Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I’m from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means ...
I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.
