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Here is an incomplete book title:

First ______ Last

Can you work out what the missing word is? Don’t continue reading until you have tried to do so.

OK, it’s difficult so, I’m going to give you a clue. Here is a description of the book (taken from Amazon.com):

This book is intended to help the start-up business, home business or entrepreneur design a professional-looking business card and letterhead at a reasonable cost. Just because you are new in business you don’t have to look like it. You can have the look of an established professional. This book covers choosing a name, typestyle, graphics, some smart business information and where to get help.

If you have the answer, well done. If not, here is the book cover (sorry about the red ink that was accidentally spilled on the key word).

Without the clues, this is quite a difficult puzzle. What happens is that your brain identifies the word ‘last’ as an adjective. But of course, it is a verb. Perhaps this could be called a parser breakdown (by the way, go down to the bottom of the page if you still don’t have the answer).

Parsing is the mental process in which the listener or reader determines the lexical categories (subject, object, verb, adjective, etc) of the words that are coming from the speaker or writer. It is a process that goes on in all of our brains during language reception.

Generally, our parsers do an excellent job. It’s not often that a misunderstanding occurs as a result of a parser breakdown. But we often like to play with language so that it does. Consider the title of a well-known book about punctuation by Lynne Truss:

To understand the title, you have to read the joke on the back cover of the book:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then takes out a gun and fires two shots in the air.
“Why?” asks the confused waiter as the panda walks towards the exit. The panda gives him a badly punctuated wildlife manual.
“I’m a panda,” he says. “Look it up.”
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

Lynne Truss is concerned with punctuation in this case. In the joke, the presence of the comma between the words ‘eats‘ and ‘shoots‘ changes the meaning of the phrase. But parser breakdowns don’t always result from bad punctuation.

For example, while reading about nebulae (the birth place of stars) on Wikipedia recently, I had to read the following sentence three times before it made sense:

“The cloud collapses and fragments, sometimes forming hundreds of new stars.”

The problem: I thought that the word ‘fragments‘ was a plural noun rather than a third person singular form verb.

Finally, three well-known jokes that depend on parser breakdowns:

Customer: Waiter, waiter, what is this?
Waiter: It’s bean soup sir.
Customer: I don’t care what it’s been. What is it now?

Customer: Waiter, waiter, this coffee tastes like mud.
Waiter: I’m not surprised sir. It was ground just a moment ago.

Q: What’s black and white and /red/ all over?
A: A newspaper

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(Click here for some further reading.)

Just wanted to nominate a couple of ELT blogs for the 2008 Edublog Awards:

• Best individual blog: The English Blog (Jeffrey Hill)

I am in awe of the time and effort that Jeffrey puts into keeping his blog which seems to be aimed at both teachers and learners. I especially like the postings which offer ideas for using news stories and the media in class. For example, this posting looks at front-page metaphorical language in the British press that was used to report and give opinion on Alistair Darling’s pre-budget statement earlier this week.

• Best resource sharing blog: Learning technology teacher development blog (Nik Peachey)

Keep an eye on this site if you like to keep up-to-date with online tools and resources with teaching potential. Many of Nik’s postings are written to the same format which works very well: The tool or resource is introduced, teaching ideas are offered, advantages and disadvantages are discussed and finally a number of related links are given. It was through this site that I discovered Wordle - my favourite teaching tool of the moment.

• Best teacher blog: Kenneth’s ESL Blog (Kenneth Beare)

Kenneth has been blogging since 2003. I hadn’t even heard of blogs back then. Had you? This is an activity-rich blog that many of my trainee teachers have found useful. It offers grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary activities, ideas for teaching English for specific purposes, and many posting for learners such as tips for self-study and exam preparation.

A good friend of mine called Dan gave me some advice recently for teaching children. He said ‘Just say everything the way it isn’t‘. In other words, if it is Tuesday, say, ‘Hello everyone, today is Friday, isn’t it?‘. Then step back as the children shout back at you, ‘No! Is Tuesday!‘. Or if Pablo has dark hair, brown eyes and is wearing a red T-Shirt, say, ‘Felipe has blond hair and blue eyes and he’s wearing a green T-Shirt. Is that right?‘

I suppose that this is a substitution for the standard classroom question. We ask, ‘What day is it?‘ or ‘What is Pablo wearing?‘, etc. For children it is an opportunity for interaction and it is the idea that underlies a song that has become very popular on YouTube:

Children must know that you are being silly but they can’t help reacting. In a way, it is a very basic form of humour. But adults would never get invloved with such primative humour, would they?

Juggler, story teller, photographer, chef, action man, and English teacher extraordinaire, Jeremy Taylor, has published an ebook called ‘Learn French with jokes‘. It’s a simple idea where the reader is given 10 words, then presented with 15 jokes that contain them followed by a quick test. This cycle is repeated throughout the book.

Jeremy gives us the opportunity to download the first 20% of the book for free and then pay if we want to continue. You also have to download the ebook software but that is quick and simple.

I was in a Spanish department store today and I saw one of of these - a genuine jamón bag. This led me to thought for the day: Have you ever noticed that when you say ‘handbag’ in English, you actually say ‘hambag’?

It’s all a question of elision followed by assimilation.

First of all the ‘d’ in handbag is left out. The same happens in the following items:

• Mashed potatoes
• Landlord
• Windmill

So as a result of elision (the emission of a sound for ease of pronunciation) we no longer have handbags, we have hanbags.

Now comes assimilation. That is when one sound starts to sound more like another, usually at a boundary between words when the words are produced quickly. So say hanbag quickly (i.e. at the speed you would normally pronounce it in spoken conversation) and it will become a hambag. The ‘n’ starts to sound like an ‘m’ - not exactly, but more or less.

The same happens in the following items:

• ‘John Belushi’ becomes Jom Belushi
• ‘The drinks are on me’ becomes The drinks are om-me
  
• ‘Human being’ becomes Humam being

What’s happening in each case is that the lips come together to produce the ‘b’ sound. And if an ‘n’ is reverberating while the lips meet, the resulting sound is an ‘m’.

I wouldn’t expect learners to spend time pronouncing their words with such attention to immaculate detail. Elision and assimilation are things that happen naturally. They refer to little changes in sound that happen in order to facilitate speech. And I can’t imagine a situation in which failure to make these subtle changes would result in a misunderstanding. But it can be interesting to know.

Last month, I uploaded the first five articles in my ‘Images’ series for English Teaching professional (click here to see posting). Here are the remaining parts:

Part 6: ‘Advertising‘
etp54_images_6.pdf

Part 7: ‘YouTube part 1‘
etp55_images_7.pdf

Part 8: ‘YouTube part 2‘
etp56_images_8.pdf

Part 9: ‘Book covers‘
etp57_images_9.pdf

Part 10: ‘Digital cameras‘
etp58_images_10.pdf

Thanks again to Helena and Christine.