Tweet Round-Up-Wednesday 26th May 2021

Bombs, manias, and teachers about to quit — here’s our weekly round-up…

Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash

English, like a lot of languages, can have words that have vastly different meanings, depending on how you use them.

“Bomb” is one such word.

Why do we use “bomb” in English in such diverse ways?

If something is “the bomb” then we mean, as @RealEvilEnglish points out, something really good, perhaps even the best. Yet if a play “bombs” or a film “bombs” it is no great success at all. To “cost a bomb” implies something costs a lot of money. There are few different meanings from a single word here. It shares that quality with certain swear words, where meaning is very flexible indeed.

Next up something I seem to have a problem with on certain mornings…particularly when I haven’t had my cup of tea…

What’s your name again?

Why are names so hard to remember? Often for me, the more distinctive a name is the harder it seems to be to remember. I’m not clear here if the name being discussed is that of a person, or a specific kind of object. But regardless, it seems for me often very difficult.

By the way, @HaggardHawks has quite an interesting Medium page (although merely an archive as they moved to Youtube in 2016) that describes interesting features of linguistics for all you word nerds out there. Check it out!

Lastly…something a bit more serious. The issue of teacher retention:

Are you a teacher who recently quit? What made you do this?

It should be fairly obvious from our name here at English Classes For The Masses that we are a progressive and left-leaning page. We don’t want the focus of English to be “business” and “corporations” all the time, but about using English as a tool for spreading positive, useful, and sometimes challenging ideas. We also want teachers to be treated well.

You can catch up on the piece by 16th Street Consulting mentioned in the above tweet, here. As it says— organisations that do not value their staff, whether they be nurses, doctors, teachers, social workers, or anyone who performs the difficult role of interaction with the public, will fail to keep them. Free doughnuts in training sessions and McDonald’s mindfulness for stressed employees are not really going to cut it. In any sector. For too long and too often people are just offered gimmicks.

That’s it for this week. Be sure to check out our tweets for next week, follow the respective pages on Twitter. See you in June!