Spring Break that wonderful break in the middle of the Spring Semester – how I love and hate it both! Vacation is, of course, a wonderful thing! Nonetheless, Spring Break for me is less of a break and more of a grading marathon to get caught up for the second half of the semester. To […]
Tag Archives: language
Mistake Idioms
Mistakes. Some are incidental while others, of course, can be substantial, but we all make them, usually on a daily basis. As a college instructor, my mistakes are so often very public and thus that much more embarrassing, frustrating, or even potentially harming than the errors of others less in the public eye. I try […]
Life Lessons from the Super Bowl
Football is the quintessential American entity with both simultaneous awful and awesome aspects. There little doubt that ticket prices are exorbitant, player salaries are not equitable, and injuries are potentially extreme; nevertheless, it provides some measure of unity across social, age, gender, and economic classes. The topic transcends the sport. When you have nothing to […]
Love Not Only for Lovers
Valentine’s day is coming up, offering a wonderful chance to express affection and appreciation for those in committed relationships. Idioms for romantic love will abound on the internet this week, so having one more from me seems superfluous. Moreover, love is not limited solely to lovers. Casual friends and even strangers in the street can […]
Language Lessons
Vocabulary, idioms, parts of speech, and more! Let’s Learn!
Friend in Me
My grandpa seemed to embrace William Butler Yeats’ idea of not knowing strangers.He was friendly to all until his last days. This is my favorite picture of him and me, taken right before he passed away in 2015. Even before the terrible Alzheimer’s disease that ultimately took his mind, I remember he was always friendly […]
Telling Lies
People lie and they always have and they always will. Abraham Lincoln once said, “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” Given the current news for the past week and […]
The Idioms of Protest
In honor of the Women’s March, which occurred this weekend, I thought it would be appropriate this week to cover some of the incredible English idioms based around marching and protesting. Here are some that I found interesting and usable in current speaking and writing. March to the beat of a different drummer means […]
Right to Assemble
Today, I want to take a brief journey into one of the American freedoms we have based on the First Amendment – the right to assemble- and how that freedom has been and is continuing to be expressed in our country. Before we dive into the actuality of a protest, let’s look at and understand […]
Handling Crisis
Crisis – not a vocabulary word we truly want to understand, but one that can’t be escaped in life. Crisis is a word with a negative connotation. As I thought about this word today, It seemed to me to be a stand-alone word and I could not easily think of an adjective form of the […]