The problem with English ...

Spend a penny


Foreign nurses are receiving a crash course in euphemism after bewildered patients expressing the wish to "spend a penny" found themselves being escorted to a hospital shop. Norfolk's Queen Elizabeth hospital has organised special "adapting to life in Norfolk" sessions for Portuguese staff whose otherwise excellent English results in too-literal translations of everyday expressions. Patients, particularly the elderly, face being met with incomprehension when complaining of "feeling under the weather", suffering "pin and needles" or experiencing problems with their "back passage".

Local expressions such as "blar", meaning to cry, and "mawther", meaning "young woman", are also likely to see mystified nurses flicking in vain through conventional phrasebooks. The distinct Norfolk brogue provides another linguistic obstacle for the recruits hired by the Queen Elizabeth Hospital King's Lynn NHS trust. "One of the things people from overseas had difficulty with was our euphemisms such as 'spend a penny'," said a hospital spokesman. "In the past some of the new recruits from abroad, when patients used the expression, were taking people to the hospital shop."

"They all speak exceptional English, but that doesn't necessarily cover the type of English spoken in Norfolk. We have many different phrases and sayings in this part of the world. A lot of patients are elderly and use what can only be described as quaint phrases and descriptions, especially for body parts and common illnesses." The hospital has organised two-hour induction courses in dialect, idiom and colloquialism, covering phrases such as "spick and span", "higgledy-piggledy", "la-di-dah" and "tickled pink". Other useful terms on the agenda are "jim jams", "a cuppa" and "elbow grease". Nurses are being asked to write down any confusing phrases they hear on the wards so they can be discussed in follow-up meetings.

Katherine Murphy, chief executive of the Patients' Association, said the training would ensure "safe service" in hospitals. "Anyone working for the NHS - nurse, doctor, other healthcare professional, healthcare assistant - must be able to be understood by the patient and must demonstrate that they are safe to treat patients," she said. But Fiona McEvoy, of the Taxpayers' Alliance, resorting to idiom herself, said it was "using a sledgehammer to crack a nut". It made more financial sense for foreign nurses to pick up local phrases "from hearing them used and being advised by peers", she said.

Procrastination

Buzz words

Denture Venturer is a great new term. Click here to go to the whole article to find out what it means and how to use it.

The World Cup

In this video from the University of Nottingham's website you can watch a rather eccentric-looking professor explainng why he believes the world cup cannot possibly be made of solid gold.

Answer key for the ice-cream marketing proposal

1A 2C 3D 4C 5B 6B 7A 8C 9B 10D 11A 12B 13D 14C 15B 16A 17D 18C

Condensed milk

With the aim of helping you improve your general knowledge, here is a link to information on condensed milk
Compare this with 'evaporated milk' which is more like the German Kaffeesahne.

The picture shows the brand that my mother used to buy (maybe she still does!).

Speaking skills

It's worth taking a look at this website to help you with your (BEC) speaking skills.

Writing styles

We won't have time to go though all this in the lectures so I suggest you do this as home study.

The British Council has free online lessons on business writing styles.
There are 5 lessons plus keys for each lesson.
You could do the lessons backwards if you like, i.e. look at the key and find out why it gives the answers that it does.
Or you can do the lessons in the usual way (all the parts that you are able to do on your own, that is).
I'll try to provide you with other info, but this is a very good place to start.

Link here

Konjunktur

listening practice

This website may at first look slightly unserious, but the listening quizzes are really worth trying out.
elllo listening practice

BRICs, PIGs and STUPIDs

Have you any idea what these acronynms stand for in the business world (and whether it is appropriate to use them)?
Read a short article to find out here

Acronym acrimony: The problem with Pigs

HR vocab

Here's a pretty good website for Human Resources related vocabulary.

http://www.lexicon.adp.com/

Language use

Here's a video you might like to watch and listen to.

To make it slightly easier, the script is below.

The 21st Century Flux

English. The new disease?
It pours out of television speakers and computer screens
Disregarding Babel with its very cocky fluency
Sticking on its labellings at every opportunity.
Nothing’s safe; it won’t stop when it begins to spread
it dominates the airwaves and reigns/rains on the internet
leaving cultures altered and confused as to what’s what
turns the dialecting of the youths to a hotch-potch
rag-tag scrabble bag; everyone’s affected
the little languages will not survive unprotected.
So hold your own, but get a firm hold of English
and every last one of us shall be a multilinguist:
sing it!
Shampoo juggernaut moolah hullabaloo
ad infinitum, pow-wow, kudos, déjà vu
Won ton, billabong, beef, potato, hobo, dream
Wha gwan with the wigwam boogie
mr Chimpanzee?
Welcome to the twenty-first century flux
for now, English is the language of choice
And when it dies, as every tongue eventually must
let it be said you added your voice
The professor said, “Pif! What language is this?
Degenerate slang isn’t standard English!
We at the top must establish limits.”
I said “Prof! Language is the people that live it.”
Get loose, give it some vision and foresight
and juice; we can fling the dictionary door wide.
I live in a city where it seems like
every single idiom is intermingling stream-like,
Like streams, that know no barriers
No matter what dams and channels are established –
they are irrelevant. What matters is the message that is put across,
and the passion that’s invested in it. Nothing’s lost
it merely mutates, and lets the people speaking it
tweak it in new ways.
Meaning that meaning is whatever you say
Jilly, Jack, Hussain, in Iraq to the UK …
to all corners; through all twists and bends
Six billion personal versions of events
It’s thrilling when you think of all the tongues on a jostle
to express their puzzle in the best words possible.
The more words we have, the more ways we have
to express the world we have to co-exist in.
And if the English language is the lingua franca of this planet,
never say that it should be a closed system.
Welcome to the twenty-first century flux
for now, English is the language of choice for the performers
But when it dies, as every tongue eventually must
let it be said you added your voice to the chorus
Cos English isn’t English; it’s an elastic patchwork
A fantastically insane confederation
a very strange tapestry of foreign vernaculars
borrowed from Norse kings, and fettered slavemen
So if language is linked to the land which it springs from
English is linked to the globe in entirety
With fragments of every language you’ll think of
Roots in every type of society:
Welsh, French, Jamaican, Indian, Italian
Dominican, Hispanic, Germanic, Norse, African,
Norman, Dutch, Latin, Greek, Japanese, Yiddish,
Native American, Antipodean and Finnish…
The list could continue till my tongue went blue;
what I’m saying is the owner is you.
It lives as it’s spoken, and it mirrors the truth
And there isn’t any owner but you…
Welcome to the twenty-first century flux
for now, English is the language of choice
But when it dies, as every tongue eventually must
let it be said you added your voice

Marketing with animated characters

A British price-comparison website has had phenomenal success with Aleksandr Orlov, an animated meerkat.
Go to the website http://www.comparethemeerkat.com/to see how it is done, and to see what all the fuss is about.
And don't forget to compare the meerkats and watch the videos too :-)