B******* Bingo, or how to think outside the box...

Apparently not everyone has been as swamped with management speak in their lives as I have, so here are a couple of links to places where you may find interesting management speak terms, or not so interesting ones... Beware, the second has a few punctuation errors, particularly in the matter of it's versus its...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/berkshire/content/articles/2005/01/19/voices_management_speak_feature.shtml

http://wossname.thingy.com/newspeak.htm

Read, enjoy, post your own favourites in the comments section.

:)

Email etiquette and coursework bibliographies

Right, this is the second time I've tried to write this.

I was very excited today to find myself, in the shape of this blog, on someone's coursework bibliography. Of course, there's not a fat lot to get excited about on coursework standardisation day, so don't take this as indicative of my usual response...

Email etiquette - article in yesterday's Times at the following link:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/caitlin_moran/article1689442.ece

I'm sure it's worth telling you that the author of this article had her first book published aged 17. Come on, some of you have still got time if you hurry....

:)

Turning Orange

I also thought that it might be worth bringing to your attention the Orange Prize for Fiction shortlist which was published earlier this week. The Orange Prize is for women writing in the English Language, and has increased the status of women writers quite substantially via it's £30,000 prize fund. Perhaps one day one of you lot might win. In any case, you can always try reading them:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Half of a Yellow Sun
Rachel Cusk Arlington Park
Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss
Xiaolu Guo A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
Jane Harris The Observations
Anne Tyler Digging to America

You may recognise the third one - it won the Booker Prize last year.

You wild child you

Thinking about Child Language Acquisition revision we started talking about Genie, the girl who featured in a Channel Four documentary a while ago. Feral children are children who have been for some reason isolated from other humans; they may have been abused or they may simply have been abandoned. History is rife with stories of children being raised by animals (anyone remember Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome?) although I read somewhere that the wolf stories in particular may have originated from prudishness - the Latin for wolf being lupus, which is very similar to lupa - meaning prostitute. Anyway, I was searching on the web for interesting CLA related info and found this excellent website:

http://www.feralchildren.com/en/index.php

Some of which is relevant to English Language and some of which is not.

So there.

And yet more on spelling...

This website is set up by someone who's written a book on the subject of the English spelling system and its vagaries. Have an explore and see what you think - I'm guessing she's a little bit obsessed.

http://www.englishspellingproblems.co.uk

Talking of jobs...

This is just a little something to help you start preparing for Lang and Occupation on ENB2:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/words/vocabulary/

It's fairly basic, mind you, but worth looking at some of the different subject-specific lexis... :)