Irregular Past Participle Forms

I went through elementary school in the bad old days, when teachers drilled the class on irregular verbs. For example:

Teacher: go
Student A: go, went, have gone
Teacher: come
Student B: come, came, have come
Teacher: write
Student C: write, wrote, have written

I don’t recall when the drills began, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t do them after the sixth grade. By then, as they say, we knew the drill.

From my experience I conclude that a child of eleven or twelve is capable of mastering the irregular verb forms. That’s why I don’t understand why so many grown-ups writing on the Web get them wrong. Here’s a sampling. By the way, one of these examples is from a writer of British English, and one is from the official web site of a museum in a large American city.

I’ve had this post sitting around for a while. Since I’ve written it, I’ve went back and forth about posting it.

A few weeks ago I started having wrist pain from playing too much basketball. Since then I’ve went to many doctors and some have said it’s tendonitis,

I want to publish my book I have wrote.

Paleo-Indian people are thought to have came to Wisconsin from the west and south about 12,000 years ago.

Old English had hundreds of what we now call irregular verbs, most of which have become regularized with -ed endings. For example, the old past forms of help–holp and holpen–now have the regular forms helped and helped. 

The process of regularization continues. For example, while many speakers still prefer to say slay, slew, (have) slain, others have begun to say slay, slayed, (have) slayed. 

The irregular verbs most resistant to change are the ones we use most frequently, like come and go. Because they are such high-frequency words, one can only wonder why speakers who have completed six or more years of formal education haven’t mastered their forms.

Perhaps readers of forums or amateur blogs aren’t troubled by “have came” or “have began,” but readers in search of accurate information probably wouldn’t attach much confidence to anything written on the following sites, each of which presents itself as a reliable source of knowledge:

Giant asteroids might have began the age of dinosaurs as well as ended it. (headline on science site) 

Over the last few decades humans have began to bend and break the laws of natural selection—laws that have governed life on Earth for the past four billion years. (course offerings, university site)

Working with what we have at the moment, we have began putting some of our birds together so we can open up enclosures and make them much bigger! (Australian wildlife park)

Source: Daily Writing Tips

We are watching you!

Overseas Teaching Jobs Every Monday!

Well, here it is Monday again and I've got the latest teaching jobs for you:

Argentina[1], Australia[1], Azerbaijan[1], Brunei[1], Bulgaria[2], Cambodia[1], Chile[1], China[59], Czech Republic[2], East Timor[1], Ecuador[1], Egypt[1], France[1], Germany[3], Hong Kong[7], Indonesia[8], Italy[15], Japan[4], Kazakhstan[4], Kuwait[1], Libya[1], Malaysia[2], Myanmar[2], Poland[5], Portugal[1], Russian Federation[22], Saudi Arabia[15], Singapore[1], Slovakia[2], South Korea[5], Spain[41], Taiwan[1], Thailand[2], Tunisia[1], Turkey[5], United Kingdom[166], United States[2], Vietnam[5], Worldwide[16]

You can always find these on our website, too at Teaching jobs

Many people would like to teach but don't have a college / university degree. The problem is not always the schools but the immigration and labour laws of the countries. Take Thailand for example. Never mind the political problems they are having right now. It is still a great place to teach. Officially, you need a degree to teach in Thailand and rightly so. The country has a right to see that teachers are well-educated and appropriately trained. That is why our TESOL Certificate Course is so well received around the world.

First, your education credentials need to be approved by the Ministry of Education. They then issue a document to the Police Immigration Authority who issue you a temporary visa. You must then go to the Ministry of Labour to obtain a work permit.

When you have that, you go back to the Immigration office and they replace the temporary visa with a one-year visa. 

Of course, if the school that hires you has several or more foreign teachers, they will likely have a person who does all the running around for you...although the first time you go through the process, the authorities want to 'see your face' so you must go along. It is much easier the second time around and as I said earlier, Thailand is a wonderful place to teach generally. Stay away from the southern most provinces where there is unrest.

You can secure a teaching position in Thailand by following one of these methods:

1) Preferred method: Apply for teaching positions from your home country. Once a school indicates that it wants to hire you, they need to send you a letter so stating. You take that to the nearest Thai embassy or consulate with your passport and ask for a Non-Immigrant 'B' Visa. You must be ready to go because you will have three months to activate the visa or it becomes void.

The 'B' type is important because this allows you to work while your documents are being processed after arriving in Thailand. The one drawback with this method is that you don't get to see the school ahead of time but perhaps they can send you pictures or have a website you can visit.

A good reason to apply this way is that being hired from a foreign country, you can ask the school to include return airfare in your contract. They may agree to reimburse you for your travel. It may be payable after completion of several months or at the end of your contract. You can then negotiate the same deal for the following year if you stay with the school. Some schools may only agree to pay this every second year.

2) Alternate method:  You could travel to Thailand on a 30-day tourist visa, find a school and apply from within the country. This lets you see the school; meet the school officials; see the environment; meet the students and even talk with other foreign teachers. If hired, you would then have to leave the country with documentation from the school and go to the Thai Embassy in Vientiane, Laos to have your tourist visa exchanged for the Non-Immigrant 'B' visa. People often travel there on the weekend, go to the embassy Monday, pick up their visa Tuesday and return. There are a number of tour operators specializing in 'visa runs'. But this requires overnight travel in a van. If you are okay with that, fine. Otherwise, LAO Air flies from Bangkok to Vientiane every day. A problem with applying from within the country is that the school will consider you a 'local hire' and thus be reluctant to pay your return airfare.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Thailand and South Korea are two countries that require you to bring your original documents (diplomas and degrees). Photocopies will not suffice. South Korea accepts copied made and certified  in their overseas embassies. Thailand does not. 

Thailand also requires a letter from your local police stating that you do not have any outstanding warrants. Too many bad guys and gals have chosen Thailand as a place to hide out from authorities in their own countries. Fingerprinting of all tourists and other foreigners arriving in Thailand has just been instituted at the borders. Never mind - still a fantastic place to teach, learn and get in some serious beach time!

Don't have a degree? Click here!

Dr. Robert

The “Pied” in The Pied Piper

The Pied Piper is a character in a German folk tale popularized in English by Robert Browning in his poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.”

In Browning’s version, a town corporation hires the Piper to rid their town of a plague of rats. They agree to pay what the Piper asks. When the rats are dead, however, the town leaders renege on the contract because the rats cannot be brought back.

In retaliation, the Piper lures away their children, never to be seen again. The moral of the tale is that cheating people can have unexpected and dreadful consequences. 

The term “pied piper” has entered the language in the sense of someone who, by means of personal charm, entices people to follow him or her, usually to disappointment or misfortune. 

Browning’s Piper wears a long coat “from heel to head” which is “half of yellow and half of red.” The coat is what gives him his name.

The adjective pied means “of two colors.” Originally, the two colors were black and white, the colors of a magpie. Magpie is where the “pie” comes from. The word usually refers to an animal with markings of two colors, especially a bird: pied kingfisher, pied flycatcher, pied finch, etc. 

In the Middle Ages, the Carmelites were called “pied friars” because their religious habit consisted of a brown tunic and a white cloak. The Benedictines and Cistercian monks were called “pied monks” because they wore a white tunic and a short black cloak. 

A pied horse–piebald– has black and white patches, although some speakers use the word pied or piebald to describe patches of any differing colors. Another type of pied horse is called a skewbald:

When the white is mixed with black it is called ‘pie-bald,’ with bay the name of ‘skew-bald’ is given to it. –Youatt’s ‘The Horse,’ 1866.

The term pied piper is popular with writers on the Web, although what they mean by it is often difficult to discern:

Rufus Harley: the Pied Piper of jazz
Todd is the Pied Piper of cool
Steve Gryb: the Pied Piper of Percussion
Mohamed El Baradei: Globalist Pied Piper of the Egyptian Revolt
Seligman: the Pied Piper of positive psychology
Ryan McGinley, the Pied Piper of the Downtown Art World
Jerry Kapstein: the Pied Piper of Free Agents

Headlines are innately ambiguous, but here’s a reference that definitely departs from the traditional meaning of pied piper as “someone charming who leads his followers to misfortune”:

“He’s a team guy and just beloved by people that know him. He’s very pleasant to be around. He’s like the Pied Piper,” Lamb said.

Perhaps a revival of Browning’s poem is in order. In our age of skullduggery, the topic remains timely. Besides, it’s fun to read aloud. Here are a few lines to get you started:

Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats,
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.

You can read it all here: ”The Pied Piper of Hamelin” by Robert Browning.

Source: Daily Writing Tips

At Your Disposal

Some speakers, perhaps because of their familiarity with the word disposal in connection with trash, seem to have trouble with the polite idiom “at your disposal.” 

For example, I saw this comment on a Yahoo forum: “If you are at their disposal, it is derogatory and demeaning.” 

Disposal and its different forms descend from Latin disponere, “to set in different places, to arrange.” The verb has more than one meaning, including the following:

• to place or arrange things in a particular order
• to make fit or ready
• to make arrangements
• to get rid of

The noun disposal can mean the action of disposing of something. In the expression “at one’s disposal,” it means “the power or right to dispose of, make use of, or deal with as one pleases.” The notion that the person “at one’s disposal” is “under the command of another” is doubtless the reason for objections to the expression by literalists.

Language has its polite conventions, and most people can tell the difference between convention and sincerity. Literalists, however, object to addressing a letter “Dear Sir” and signing it “Yours faithfully” on the grounds that the language is “too intimate” to use with a stranger.

Taking the quotation a little out of context, I’ll let Dr. Johnson explain the difference between sincerity and social convention:

you may say to a man, “Sir, I am your most humble servant.” You are not his most humble servant. You may say, “These are sad times…” You don’t mind the times. You tell a man, “I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet.” You don’t care six-pence whether he was wet or dry. You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society”

Speakers who object to putting a person at someone’s disposal can still use the idiom in regard to an object or a facility. Here are some examples of current usage:

Rest assured that Alotta Properties, Inc. will be at your disposal for as long as you need us.

Anecdotal evidence is great and it’s even better the more of it you have at your disposal.

But, my good sir, why do you come to me? Your motive is most excellent, but an honest employment is the last thing at my disposal.

Source: Daily Writing Tips

Phrases from the Oxford Dictionary online:

at one's disposal

Available for one to use whenever or however one wishes: a helicopter was put at their disposal

at someone's disposal

Ready to assist the person concerned in any way they wish: I am at your disposal until Sunday

Is “positivity” a real word?

A reader questions the acceptability of the word positivity:

Is “positivity” a real word? I have found it on a couple of on-line dictionary sources, but it sounds so wrong and makes me cringe every time I hear it. I feel that people think that if negativity is a word, then the antonym must be positivity, and not positiveness.

Until I received this query I’d never questioned the reality of the word positivity. Afterwards I discovered that the question appears to be a common one on the Web. I don’t understand why this should be so.

The suffix -ivity occurs in a great many common English words. A few of the most familiar:

activity
captivity
conductivity
creativity
festivity
sensitivity
nativity
negativity
objectivity
receptivity

The suffix -ivity is added to an adjective to make it into an abstract noun. The suffix appears in borrowings and adaptations of Latin and French words from the end of the Old English period; it becomes common after the Norman Conquest: nativity (1225), captivity (1380). When the adjective ends in -il or -le, the suffix -ility is added to the adjective: humility (1315), durability (1374), ability (1398).

The suffix -ness is the more usual suffix used to form abstract nouns nowadays, but -ivity is still used in scientific contexts to form abstract nouns denoting a specific property of a material: incendivity, elastivity.
According to the OED, positivity predates negativity in English by 167 years. In 1659, the reference is to the “positivity of sin”; in 1826, Coleridge speaks of the “Spirit of Negativity.”

The reader quoted above feels that positiveness is the “real” word and that positivity should not be used at all. Many speakers do use the word positiveness to mean the quality of looking on the bright side, but others see a difference in connotation between positivity and positiveness.
For speakers who see a difference, positivity means the quality of looking on the bright side:

If you approach the day with enthusiasm, positivity and openness, usually you’ll get the same back.

Positiveness, on the other hand, is seen by some as a synonym for dogmatism:

These relations are so extensive, that positiveness, or dogma, is scarcely anywhere free from the liability to contradiction.

As far as I can tell, there’s no reason to despise the word positivity.
According to the Google Ngram Viewer, positivity is far more common in print than positiveness. Indeed, every example of the word positiveness in the Word file of this article has a red line under it.

Source: Daily Writing Tips

Fed Up with your Job?

Are you fed up with your job? Can’t see a good future where you are? Ready for a complete change? Just graduated and want to do something meaningful? Well, here’s something to think about…

There are thousands of jobs available overseas to people who are either native English speakers or who have a good knowledge of the language and who want to teach English to children or adults , and - you don't have to already be a teacher!

Below are some of the thousands of current jobs. These are from one source. There are many such sources. When you register for our TESOL course, we will show you where to find teaching positions in many countries:

Here are the latest teaching jobs from around the world as of May 12, 2014. Bear in mind that this represents only a small portion of all the jobs out there.

Current Database Status (country/jobs):

Argentina[1], Azerbaijan[1], Brunei[1], Bulgaria[2], Cambodia[1], Chile[1], China[61], Czech Republic[3], East Timor[1], Ecuador[1], Egypt[1], France[1], Germany[4], Greece[1], Hong Kong[6], Indonesia[10], Italy[12], Japan[4], Kazakhstan[5], Kuwait[1], Latvia[1], Libya[3], Malaysia[1], Malta[1], Myanmar[2], Poland[5], Russian Federation[26], Saudi Arabia[17], Singapore[1], Slovakia[1], South Korea[6], Spain[33], Taiwan[1], Tajikistan[2], Tanzania[1], Thailand[4], Tunisia[1], Turkey[5], United Kingdom[162], United States[2], Vietnam[5], Worldwide[15]

Wherever you want to go, teaching jobs are likely available but it is harder to get hired in some places. Western Europe is a tough nut to crack. Eastern Europe has many opportunities as does South America. Still atop the list of areas that desperately need a huge number of English teachers is Asia.  It is tougher to get a teaching job in Hong Kong and Japan but South Korea, Thailand, China and Indonesia offer many opportunities. Be flexible and prepared to go where the jobs are to gain experience.

All it takes is a degree and a TESOL or TEFL certificate . Most schools will even reimburse your airfare! WAIT! No degree? Contact us through our web site! We can help you!

There couldn't be a better time to get started than right now! You could be teaching in one of these countries within a few weeks. Some of our students are hired even before they complete their TESOL course and we are delighted to forward their certificate to their new school!

Go to our web site and get started today on a course that will change your life very quickly! Jobs are tough to get at home. Not so overseas. All you need is a willingness to accept other cultures, a degree in any discipline and our TESOL certificate.  Then you’ll be ready to start 2014 with a new career!

Click on the link to start on a whole new adventure and life experience!

Dr. Robert Taylor

Dean of Studies                      

Sunbridge Institute of English

Efforting to Remain Calm

I have a reader to thank (to blame?) for telling me about a coinage that is new to me.

It may have begun with television announcers, but it’s spreading. Since I began looking for it, I’ve even found it in a book on sociology published by W.W. Norton.

The word is efforting. Here are some examples of its use by television announcers:

We are efforting to restore the signal from Fort Hood.
We are efforting her report. –Brian Williams, NBC
we are efforting, trying to get a reaction from Georgia’s President. –Tony Harris, CNN
we are efforting to get an interview with General Tommy Franks…

Here it is in some Web headlines:

Rugby Canada/USA Rugby efforting to get second half on EPN July 11
Solution efforting seems to fall in a gap between teams
Strong Efforting Team to Avoid Letdown
Group efforting signatures to repeal transgender law

The genius of English word formation is responsible for keeping the language supplied with new words for new ideas, and I rejoice in it. But I have to admit that I cannot see what new idea this strange new verb expresses.

It seems to me that one would try to restore a signal. Couldn’t one attempt to get an interview with someone?

Before verbing the noun effort, consider whether one of the following might serve your purpose:
attempt
endeavor
exert oneself
make an effort
try
strive
venture
work at

Source: Daily Writing Tips