by Here’s a 15-minute video of Timișoara that an intrepid American couple recently put up on YouTube. It showcases my picturesque city (I think of it as my city) pretty well. I wouldn’t recommend you come right now because of the searing heat, but in autumn or spring, or even early summer, an enjoyable and relaxing time in this beautiful place is just about guaranteed.
This is what my whiteboard looked like at the end of Saturday morning’s lesson.
I explained that we sometimes use so-called delexical verbs such as get, give and take, where the meaning is taken out of the verb and put into the noun, for example “give the house a clean” as an alternative to “clean the house”. I notice that I mistakenly wrote “give my house a clean” rather than “…the house…”. We love possessives in English, but we wouldn’t normally use one there.
Today I played Bananagrams with a boy of (I think) eleven. This was how it panned out (his effort on the left, mine with excessive wind on the right):
Kids seem to like the game. There’s no scoring, it doesn’t feel competitive, and they I know I’m always there to help them (and say no every time they ask me if AI or PC or any other ridiculous abbreviation is a word). In this game I also had to say no to MICES. Why can’t you have that? C’mon, think about it! By the way, if you ever play Bananagrams, try and make some longish words off the bat – I started with FLOODING and FARMER – to improve your chances of being able to join on later.
Another non-competitive word game I play sometimes with kids is Hangman. I recently watched a surprisingly interesting video about some of the oddities of the game. Yes, you literally draw a decapitation as an education tool for little kids. When I was six, I had a Milton Bradley boxed version of Hangman which was competitive. Both you and your opponent (seated opposite each other) chose a word of up to eight letters; the first to guess the opponent’s word was the winner. At the start of the game you put the letter tiles into slots, facing yourself. You turned them around as your opponent guessed them; this meant you had to insert the letters in reverse. Every time your opponent guessed a letter that wasn’t in your word, you turned a dial that showed an additional limb on a stick figure. When I played with Dad, he’d often forget to reverse the letters, leaving a six-year-old boy hopelessly struggling with complete gibberish.
I’ve watched almost none of this year’s Wimbledon so far. I saw half an hour of an Alcaraz match (not a bad player, that guy) with Serbian commentary, and that’s been it. Last weekend I found myself more interested in the Ashes cricket, for some reason. I listened to two of the players being interviewed after the match. They both invariably appended a –y onto the ends of their teammates’ names. Brooky and Broady and the rhyming trio of Stokesy and Woakesy and Foakesy. No first names at all. What are the rules for this stuff? What if you have a multi-syllable surname? What if your surname already has a –y stuck on the end, like Batty or Hardy? It’s something that smacks of British public schools to me, but maybe I’m overthinking it. (Aussies stick an -o on the end instead: Johnno and Thommo and Deano and Wayno.)
Here are some pictures from the open-air concert on Friday night:
Tomorrow morning I have to go to some depot with the plumber to select pipes and what have you. He’ll start putting my central heating in on 25th July.
