Please join me in praying for International Missions during the last few days of this special week of prayer! Here's a prayer guide with more specifics:
Vietnamese of Cambodia
Peoples of Iran
Lost Cities of China
Peoples of the Canary Islands
Friday, December 4, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
"If People Would Just Learn English..."
I've had quite a few years to master this language we call English, both in oral and written form. My dad recently shared with me some funny pics of signage that people had used to demonstrate their desire for everyone in the United States to speak English. The comical part was that every single one of those signs had a major spelling or grammatical error!
I happen to agree that we need to have a common language, and that language in the US ought to be English. However, I temper that opinion with a lot of compassion for those that are working hard to learn a language that is very difficult. Don't believe me? Check out this poem (and many more at The Spelling Society):
Quoted by Vivian Cook and Melvin Bragg 2004,
by Richard Krogh, in D Bolinger & D A Sears, Aspects of Language, 1981,
and in Spelling Progress Bulletin March 1961, Brush up on your English.
I happen to agree that we need to have a common language, and that language in the US ought to be English. However, I temper that opinion with a lot of compassion for those that are working hard to learn a language that is very difficult. Don't believe me? Check out this poem (and many more at The Spelling Society):
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, slough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead -
For goodness sake don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart -
Come, come, I've hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I'd mastered it when I was five!
And yet to write it the more I sigh,
I'll not learn how til the day I die!
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, slough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead -
For goodness sake don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart -
Come, come, I've hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I'd mastered it when I was five!
And yet to write it the more I sigh,
I'll not learn how til the day I die!
Quoted by Vivian Cook and Melvin Bragg 2004,
by Richard Krogh, in D Bolinger & D A Sears, Aspects of Language, 1981,
and in Spelling Progress Bulletin March 1961, Brush up on your English.
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