Category Archives: English

An awesome coincident

By terje | Published: November 23, 2008
So I’m sitting in my room, working on my linguistics home exam, and I’m trying to explain why the verb paint in the sentence his father was painting a picture is not the same verb as the paint in the sentence his father never painted again, right? My line of resoning is the kind I [...]
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For better or worse, you just don’t get life stories like this anymore (Or, the only thing missing is piracy)

By terje | Published: November 10, 2008
“Raised in an Ibo village (in modern Nigeria), Olaudah Equiano (ca 1745-1797) was kidnapped by African raiders and slod into slavery. He survived the horrors of the Middle Passage to the New World, where an English naval officer bought him ito serve as a cabin boy and renamed him Gustavus Vassa, after a sixteenth-century Swedish [...]
Also posted in Awe, Conflicting emotions, Education, History, Impressions, Literature, Misery, Nostalgia, Quote of the day, Relief, What I Learned Today, Whoa, Wistfulness, Words | 7 Comments

An English villager’s complaint

By terje | Published: October 15, 2008
Ye friends to truth, ye statesman who survey The rich man’s joys increase, the poor’s decay, ‘T is yours to judge how wide the limits stand Between a splendid and an happy land. Proud swells the tide with loads of freighted ore, And shouting Folly hails them from her shore; Hoards e’en beyond the miser’s wish abound, And rich men flock from [...]
Also posted in A Moistening of the Eyes, Art, Awe, Education, Goosebumps!, History, Language, Literature, Nostalgia, Poetry, Politics, Quote of the day, Wistfulness | 4 Comments

Not again!

By terje | Published: August 30, 2008
Shit. Here I turn my head for a second, and when I turn back towards the ‘net again, two months have passed. If I’d had a dollar for every time this has happened (or, perhaps more precise, for every time I’ve done this) in the last three years, I’d probably have… enough for a soda, anyway. So, [...]
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Inspiration strikes from the weirdest skies…

By terje | Published: April 10, 2008
So, we’re doing syntax in the English linguistics course I’m taking, and in today’s lecture, we went through the various ways of determining whether or not a string of words is a phrase or not — a mildly put important part of the whole syntax bit. One of the examples the lecturer used was the [...]
Also posted in Art, Boredom, Coincidents, Education, Language, My microcosmos, Poetry, Weird stuff, What I Learned Today | Leave a comment

Curses! Or constructing next term’s schedule

By terje | Published: December 21, 2007
I checked my course registration page at NTNU (ooh!) about an hour ago, and much to my delight I discovered that I’ve been registered for not two but three courses this spring, and that these three combined fill my required term quota of 30 study points. English Linguistics gives me 7,5 points if I pass it; [...]
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Our hope

By terje | Published: December 15, 2007
“But we will not be around in 500 years to see how our predictions have fared; we can only hope that historians of that future time will be understanding of our inability to guess how things would turn out and why.” — Laurie Bauer in the conclusion of the discussion of the chances of a [...]
Also posted in History, Hope, Language, Quote of the day, Speculations | Leave a comment

Help! A “challenge”

By terje | Published: December 15, 2007
So. I had an exam in English Language Proficiency just over two weeks ago, where one of the tasks were “language correction: identify, correct and briefly explain the grammar ortography mistakes in the following text”. It was supposed to be 13 mistakes here, but I only found eleven. Can you help me locate the last [...]
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I’m concerned for my university

By terje | Published: December 14, 2007
I had my fifth and final exam for the term today, and unfortunately, I thought it was just like the four previous ones. You see, based on the curriculi and the lectures in the courses I’ve been taking this fall, I’ve been expecting to be satisfied with a straight Cs. Global English had a lot of [...]
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“Global English” is rubbish

By terje | Published: December 13, 2007
“Given the stress that is laid on spelling by prescriptivists, and the existence of so many dictionaries which provide standard spellings for English words, it is perhaps surprising that there should be any variation in spelling within standard varieties. But there is. Some of this variation is variation between varieties. More often, though, there us [...]
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