ENGLISH ACTUALLY
Bob Yareham
Obrapropia
© Texto: Bob Yareham
© Edición: OBRAPROPIA, S.L.
Calle Martí, 18
46005 VALENCIA
www.obrapropia.com
ISBN: 978-84-16717-99-6
Queda prohibida, salvo excepción prevista en la ley, cualquier forma de reproducción, distribución, comunicación pública y transformación de esta obra sin contar con la autorización de los titulares de la propiedad intelectual. La infracción de los derechos mencionados puede ser constitutiva de un delito contra la propiedad intelectual (arts. 270 y ss. del Código Penal)
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
ORIGINS
Back to the Future (Geeks Like Greeks)
Alpha Beta
Apocalypse Now, Armageddon Later
What have the Romans ever done for us?
Passing The Acid Test
Me Paranoid? Who Said That?
Peeping Toms and Doubting Thomases
Declining Values
“Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte?”
Something should be done
Where You Lead I Will Grovel
Mine’s Barmy
Slightly Off Balance On A Greek Pedestal
All Change!
Beyond Good and Evil
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Coming in from out of the World.
Under the Stars
Falling Standards
Tantrums and doldrums
MEN, WOMEN AND OTHERS
Your Wildest Dreams
All Men are Beasts
Ho, ho, ho
Sex and the Single Married Man
Viagra Falls (In Praise of Spanish Women)
Divide By Life
Le Vice Anglais
Understanding Women
Evil Women
A Flick of the Wrist
I’ve Got You Under My Skin
Dear Sir or Madam
The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Woman
POLITICS, RELIGION AND FOOTBALL
The Sunny Side of the Planet
Slightly Armageddon
God, Horses and Women
History Lesions: Gulf War II
History Lesions: A Good War
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Voter
So that was Easter……
My Fellow Europeans
The Language of Politics
God Bless Ye Merry Atheists!
English for killing people
Do You Speak Churchill? Britain’s Other Winnie (Part Twelve)
All men are…….
Burn the Bible!
Burn the priests!
At Your Service: a preliminary manifesto
Did Jesus Wear A Kilt?
MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR LEFT!
Englishlessness
Stealing from Foreigners
English Racism!
Uncle Sam, We have A Problem!
There’s a Place for us
Nothing Good Ever Came out of Scotland
A little bit of gratuitous anti-Americanism
It may all be Greek to you………..!
The Past Present
Shakespeare’s Children
A Plague on all your Houses!
Curry and Chips (Starters)
Curry and Chips (Main Course)
Common as Muck
A House Is Not A Home
A Cake too Far
All the colours of the rainbow
As Far As It Goes
Across the Pond
Heave Away
The Burden of Being British
Gluttons for Pun-ishment
SUBJECTS MATTER
The Floor Rushed up to meet me
The Target Rich Language of War
The Beastly Sixties
Swallows and Sparrows
Pumping the Seed Inside
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and the other one.
On the Cards
Mind our Language Part One: Sweet FA
Mind our Language Part Two: A Nice Shag
Love Can’t Buy me Money
Kleenex Culture
Footnotes
Flower Power
Say it with Flowers
Dress Senselessness
Bird Flew
Death and taxes
Cat Food
Business Language for Beginners.
The Wonderful World of Nature
Food for thought
Fly like a penguin, sting like a beer!
I slept with David Beckham
Potty-Training
Divine
What’s So Great About War?
All the Rages
All You Need
Reading the Daily Mail
Beat to Quarters!
The Old Man and the Sea
On Certainty
As Brisk as Ketchup
THE LANGUAGE THAT YOU USE
As Sliced Bread
The Eric Speeves Guide to Good Writing
The Irreplaceable Eric Speeves
Da Shakespeare Code
The Hair of the Dog
Plumbing the Depths and Scraping the Barrel
Word Droppings
Stating the Obvious
Making Do With English
Playing with words
Opposites Attract
A Rational Supposition Regarding Conspiracy
The Line’s Busy
The Things we Say.
The Long and the Short of Things
Roaming, Wandering, Pondering, Paddling.
Offshowmanship
Time for a Quickie
GRAMMARIANS, LIBRARIANS AND OTHER OCTOGENARIANS
Come Pound with Me
Jekyll and Hidden
Order And Law
The Ups and Downs of Phrasal Verbs
When the Ship Comes In
Presumably Prepositional Perplexity
I Must Be Off
Help, I Need Some Auxiliaries.
Jargon: Big words in small ponds.
Pretty Polysemy
Skyscrapers, Suitcases and Underwear
The Short, The Sweet and The Curly
The Great Bowel Shift
Up mine, up Theirs, up Yours.
The Catchphrase in the Corn
The Human Conditional
Grievous Bodily Shaw
POSTLOGUE
Football and Philosophy
“Given the choice between naked truth and thinly veiled lies, I would always opt for discretion.”
Eric Speeves
“Teaching English means never not having to say ‘it depends’.”
Bob Yareham
For all those people who encouraged me to keep going instead of earning some real money; among them:
Harald Weissling, Peter Baker, Jeff Whittington, John Hill, Andy Birch, Salvador Capuz, Jaime Almenar And The Late, Great Mike Binns.
Thanks to some of my better-known Valencian students: Agnes Noguera, Eduardo Beut, Pablo Romà, José Miguel Cortés, Carlos Bertomeu, Salvador Capuz, Francisco Mora, Jaime Almenar, Carmen Dolz, and also to the lesser known Hoi Polloi; you know who you are.
PROLOGUE
I can remember very clearly the first time I became aware of the English language as an objective reality. It was in the summer of 1978 in Reading when I noticed that a lot of English verbs suddenly adopt an –ed at the end when you’re talking about the past.
It was I suppose unfortunate that this moment of blinding clarity should have come ten minutes into my first ever lesson as a teacher of English as a foreign language, and not before.
Fortunately, people can be kind, even students, and I was helped through the rest of the lesson, and the rest of the course in fact, by the intelligent suggestions and observations of the very people who were paying serious money to learn from me, as if ‘native speaker’ were a bonafide profession.
Speaking a language fluently doesn’t necessarily mean that you have the slightest idea how it works, but languages have structure, and they have history, and their words and expressions tell stories.
I’ve been teaching English for some time now since that day in 1978, and I think I might be getting better. The English language is a thing of great beauty and it still manages to surprise and delight me. I’ve become a bit of an etymologist over the years, and one of those insufferable bores at parties who interrupts a perfectly interesting conversation that actually has a topic to say: “did you know…..?” and then prattles on about the undeniable practicality of the non-defining relative clause, or that Wednesday has a D in it because it was originally Woden’s day.
Being born English has been a happy accident for me, allowing me to ripen as a teacher and earn a reasonable living without ever having had to actually develop any practical skills other than those of dissembling, subterfuge and obfuscation.