February 2021

Lesson #199: Observing changes in English words over time, through Cowper’s ‘The Rose’

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🥀 ‘Does it not make you think of Cowper? “Ye fallen avenues, once more I mourn your fate unmerited.”‘ – Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park Austen fans will be interested to know that William Cowper (1731-1800) was her favourite poet, as well as her contemporary. Cowper (pronounced COO-per) was known not only for his […]

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Lesson #198: Appreciating Descriptive Writing from Dickens’ ‘Oliver Twist’

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📘 One of Charles Dickens’ most famous novels is Oliver Twist (1838), also one of his earliest works.  Even if you haven’t read the book, you may well have watched one of the musicals or movies that have been made on the story. I watched the 1968 Oliver! musical when I was young, and it has remained one of

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Lesson #197: Alice’s Adventures With Homographs and Homophones (Words That Are Spelled Or Sound The Same)

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📗 “Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.” – Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) One of the most famous children’s books in the word is certainly Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), which has been translated into at least 174 since it was first published over

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Lesson #196: ‘As If’ vs ‘As Though’ through Hardy’s ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’

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📙 ‘As though a rose should shut And be a bud again.’ – Thomas Hardy, Far From The Madding Crowd (1874) 🥀 … If you have been around native English speakers enjoying a casual conversation, you are likely to have heard them use the word ‘like’ often when making a comparison of some kind. ✒️

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Lesson #195: ‘At’, ‘By’, ‘In’, ‘Into’, ‘On’, ‘Out of’: Describing Location and Movement with Prepositions of Place

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📙 So the Swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates.   He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets.   Under the archway of a bridge

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Mini-Lesson Monday, Lesson #194 (Part 2): ‘Must’, ‘Have To/Have Got To, ‘Should’, And ‘Ought To’: Modal Verb Forms That Express Obligation

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📗 ‘I probably never should have loved him, and if I loved him first, and then made the discovery, I fear I should have thought it my duty not to have married him.’ – Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall We will continue our Lesson on ‘modal verb forms that express obligation’ here. We

Mini-Lesson Monday, Lesson #194 (Part 2): ‘Must’, ‘Have To/Have Got To, ‘Should’, And ‘Ought To’: Modal Verb Forms That Express Obligation Read More »

Mini-Lesson Monday, Lesson #194 (Part 1): ‘Must’, ‘Have To/Have Got To, ‘Should’, And ‘Ought To’: Modal Verb Forms That Express Obligation

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📗 ‘You must go back with me to the autumn of 1827.’ – Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Since modal verbs (also known as auxiliary or helping verbs) are so important in English, we are going to look at four forms that are sometimes problematic for English learners of all levels. These are

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Lesson #193: ‘A Song of Harvest’: Some Observations on Whittier’s Poem

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🌳 I am sharing a poem with you today from my 110-year-old volume of John Greenleaf Whittier’s poems (published in 1894 and this edition dating from 1911)! Anyone who knows me knows of my love of books, and especially any old copies I can find. What makes the acquisition (the fact of owning or getting)

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Lesson #192: Inversions of Word Order When Using Interrogative and Relative Pronouns

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‘Who’, ‘how’, ‘which’, ‘why’, ‘when’, ‘where’ – these are often called question words or interrogative pronouns. But they are also relative pronouns. These two different functions sometimes lead to common mistakes, especially in relation to where they are placed in a sentence’s word order. In this Lesson we will look at the functions of both

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Lesson #191: Describing Contrast with Transition Words ‘Although’, ‘Though’, and ‘Even Though’

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If you have ever heard someone mention ‘Lilliput’ or ‘Brobdingnag’, you have heard a reference to one very early English classic, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (1726). 📗 It is a fantasy story of a surgeon and captain called Lemuel Gulliver who is shipwrecked on islands of tiny people

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Lesson #190: Understanding the Difference between ‘Beside’ vs ‘Besides’

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📙 “And one day, I remember, I met Miss Matty in the lane that leads to Combehurst; she was walking on the footpath, which, you know, is raised a good way above the road, and a gentleman rode beside her, and was talking to her, and she was looking down at some primroses she had

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Lesson #189: ‘We ought to use the pluperfect and say wakened …’: All About The Pluperfect/Past Perfect Tense in English

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📗 ‘Feeling that Peter was on his way back, the Neverland had again woke into life. We ought to use the pluperfect and say wakened, but woke is better and was always used by Peter.’ – J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1904) … Perhaps you have heard or even watched a movie on Peter Pan,

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