Humor4u

Who is sloppier when it comes to grammar or should we all just get over it? A recent discussion on a teachers’forum has made me wonder amusingly and bemusedly again about correctness, prescriptive grammar rules and how English teachers just LOVE grammar and arguing about it - I wish lexis would prompt such heated debates, for example what verb should go with knowledge : gain or acquire ? or some such. Among the comments about pointlessness of teaching grammar to students -  why bother if native speakers make mistakes - the one that stuck with me was an amusing remark made by my friend, colleague and former co-mentor Adele who often comes by this blog (Adele, are you reading?). She wrote: […] It took me a while after marrying a Brit, to get used to the poor grammar prevalent in the UK even among many educated people. Adele Interesting thought… Recently I was coordinating Jeremy Harmer ’s visit to Israel . As part of his programme, he was scheduled to appear as ...

The next few posts I want to do will be about my hillbilly comic characters, but since I still need to go digging to find them, here are some drawings that were originally put up on my Tumblr . Here's Anne and Lore from Don't Deliver Us From Evil (again). I post a lot of weird little post-its and work doodles on my Tumblr. Most of the stuff on there doesn't make it to my blog. Here's a new character from my Skadi comic. I do this kind of stuff when I'm at work waiting for a new assignment. It took me a while to figure out how Tumblr worked, and why anyone would want to use it, but it's actually pretty neat. Doodled on a windy day. Come back soon to see more hillbilly stuff! Thanks guys!

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Blog visitors poll Leoxicon is about to clock up ten thousand visitors and I thought I should do something to celebrate this achievement. At first I thought I'd revamp the look of my blog but you need time for that and there is not much you can do on Blogger until they improve their Dynamic Views templates. Then I thought since this blog is all about collocations and lexical chunks I should add a nice little widget somewhere on the right displaying a new chunk every day. But my internet search for "a phrase of the day" or "an expression of the day" widget drew a blank. It's funny that despite all the evidence and research, whether cognitive or psycholinguistic, pointing to the phrasal nature of the lexicon, i.e. words are remembered, stored and retrieved in chunks, all the EFL teaching materials are still preoccupied with words, words, single words. The integration of web technologies doesn't seem to have helped either.  Having said that, I've stumbl...

For the January 2012 issue of the newsletter for the International Society for Evidence-Based Health Care