English For Americans ....American for Brits .... and Canadian Speech Plumb in the Middle !!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most of us have friends and acquaintances caught up in the throes and mental anguish of learning the English language.In fact , I have one of these dauntless learners sleeping next pillow over  ...... who might very well startle me to full awakening at 3 o'clock in the morning by asking whether....... besides their indvidual specific meanings  ,,,,,, the words  "spatter , scatter , splatter , clatter , chatter , tatter and shatter " might share another all - embracing semantic feature ?  Or maybe something simpler such as whether " egotistic " could be a variant of "egoistic "? Yes , Fluff is an avid learner and will stop at nothing less than the mastery of the English language. Both she and her friend and countrymate , Mona , are well on their way to achieving that goal as  attested to by the quality of their excellent blogposts. So now enough said ..... and on to the raison d' être of today's post.

Let's suppose that a learner were to seek your help asking  you , an English speaker , the following questions. Please do not scurry for the dictionaries and grammars in search of  "correct" answers. Simply tell him / her what YOU think to be an acceptable response to his / her query. 

1. Your friend is playing Monopoly when one of the two dice rolls beyond her reach .......so she asks the player to her right to pass it to her. How should she formulate her request ? In other words .... what is the singular of "dice "?  

2. Recently your friend has been enhancing and enriching her knowledge of English by listening to some George W. Bush audio tapes The pronunciation of two terms caught her attention as to the number of syllables per word...... the two words were "heinous "and " mischievous " ! So , how many syllables ... 2 , 3 or 4 ?.

3. While listening to CNN news yesterday she  heard reporter , Carol Costello , describe a near miss between two airplanes on the ground somewhere in the USA. The planes came to a stop and passengers were taken off of the planes as soon as possible. Your learner friend wants to know whether she could also say "taken off the plane or planes " ?  Is one way more standard than the other ?.

4. And then come the pronunciation quandaries...... explaining the logical relationship between the letter  "o " and the real vowel sounds it represents in the words such as womb , bomb and comb !!.... or even worse in -ough - ending words such as though , bough , through , hiccough , trough , enough  , slough , plough , etc 

5. She might likewise have learned through her experience that  not knowing Jack Sh_t could be considered by some as a serious drawback and thus impede  one's intellectual capability and well - being. And Sam Hill ? Who in the Sam Hill was he and what is his place in North American speech ? And where did poor Benedict Arnold go wrong ? Not to speak of Tom Foolery !  

6. And how do you teach  a foreigner the full meaning of the word " snookums " and that warm and fuzzy feeling it kindles inside you the first time you find yourself in the privileged position of being able to  call somebody by that name........  get away with it and not feel odd  doing so !!