2017 January Flashcards
When Good People Do Good Things
Posted on Wednesday - January 4, 2017 by Warren Ediger
When I see them, I often save articles that describe good people doing good things. Here are two of my favorites from 2016.
At rest with honor. Andrew Moore died last year the way he had lived most of his life . . . alone.
When Moore was young, he was placed in an orphanage, a home for children without parents. When he was a teenager, he ran away.
He had no family. He never married. And when he died, he was living alone in a small apartment in an apartment building in Washington, D.C., for people with little money.
Moore might have been alone, but he was not lonely. He made friends easily and knew most of the people who lived and worked in the apartment building. They say he made their lives brighter.
Because Moore had no money, no family, and no will (instructions for after you die), he would have been buried by the city of Washington and forgotten. But two of his friends from the apartment building had a different idea: they wanted him buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Arlington National Cemetery is a place to honor men and women who have served (worked for) the U.S., especially those who had served in the military. Many veterans (people who have fought in a war) are buried there. So are important leaders, like John F. Kennedy, scientists, astronauts, and important American musicians.
Moore’s friends knew he had served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and was qualified (met the requirements) to be buried at Arlington. They completed all the paperwork that was required and collected money from others who lived in the apartment building to help with the expenses. It was difficult and took a lot of time.
Finally, on a cold, windy Friday morning last spring, Moore was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in a full military ceremony, along with more than 14,000 others who, like him, had served their country.
Her father’s heart. Ten years ago, Jeni Stepien’s father was shot and killed during a robbery. While he lay in the hospital, dying, his family decided to donate (give) his organs (heart and other body parts) to an organization that finds people who need them and makes it possible for the families to stay in touch with each other after the transplant (moving an organ from one person to another).
Stepien’s father’s heart went to another father, Arthur Thomas, who had congestive heart failure (when the heart stops working properly). He would have died in just a few days without the new heart. After the transplant, Stepien’s and Thomas’s families became friends through phone calls, letters, and emails.
When Stepien planned her wedding last year, she wanted to remember her father in a special way. After talking to her family, she invited Thomas to walk her from the back of the church to the front, like her father would have done. Thomas agreed to do it.
At the wedding, Stepien and Thomas walked to the front of the church, then stopped and looked at each other. Thomas took her hand and briefly held it over his – her father’s – heart so she could feel the heartbeat. Her father was there.
Happy New Year!
~ Warren Ediger – ESL tutor/coach and creator of the Successful English website.
This post was adapted from articles in the New York Times and Washington Post.
Photo of Arlington National Cemetery courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
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Mail by Mule
Posted on Tuesday - January 10, 2017 by Dr. Lucy Tse
Americans love to complain about the United States Postal Service (USPS), which we more commonly call the “post office.” They are blamed for lost or late mail, even for the amount of junk mail (unwanted mail, including advertisements) we receive. But if we step back and look at the extraordinary lengths (efforts) the USPS goes to to deliver mail, we might appreciate the post office a little more.
The Grand Canyon (see English Cafe 245) is the 277 mile (440 km) long and 6,000 foot (1,800 meter) deep gorge (low area between two mountains) in Arizona. It’s a place of wonder (causing awe and admiration) and natural beauty.
At the bottom of the Canyon, but outside of the national park the Canyon is located in, lives a Native American tribe called the Havasupai. They live on the Havasupai Reservation, land officially set aside by the U.S. government for their use.
Most of the Havasupai live in the village of Supai. Both the reservation and the village are in a remote (difficult to get to) place, but it is very beautiful, with four blue-green waterfalls. There are no roads. To get there, you will need to walk, ride a horse or other animal, row a boat, or travel by helicopter.
Even so, the people on the reservation get their mail six days a week. How does it get there? It arrives by mule (see photo).
The U.S. Postal Service uses contractors (people who are hired for a service by agreement) for this service. A contractor picks up the mail from the nearby town of Peach Springs, Arizona, and travels by car for about an hour to the top of the canyon. From there, the owner of the mule team (group of animals working together) who has done this job for over 25 years, loads up the mail onto the mules, each mule carrying up to 200 pounds. The mule team then travel the eight miles down into the canyon, usually taking three hours down and five hours back up.
Most of the “mail” that makes this trip isn’t mail at all — it’s supplies (necessary things for one to live or work). So without mail service, the village could not survive. The mail service delivers basic items, such as soap and medicine, but also modern amenities (useful and desirable things), such as packaged food (food in bags, boxes, or containers), small appliances (machines used in the home), and even orders from Amazon.com!
If spending time in this remote place sounds good to you, then you can visit the village of Supai. In addition to hiking, horseback riding, or picnicking (eating a meal outdoors) in this beautiful place, you can visit the village store and cafe, and there is even a museum for tourists. If you’d like to stay at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, you can rent a room at Phantom Ranch. Interestingly, if someone sends you mail while you’re staying there, your letter or package will have a stamp (official mark in ink) on it that reads, “Mailed by Mule.” In fact, Supai is the last official mail-by-mule route in the United States.
~ Lucy
Photo Credit: From Wikipedia
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The Word Of The Year Is . . .
Posted on Wednesday - January 18, 2017 by Warren Ediger
. . . is surreal.
In the early 1800s, Noah Webster wrote the first American dictionary to show how American English is different than British English. His dictionary, now called Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, is probably the most-used American English dictionary. Most of us grew up on it (used it in school from the time we were young).
Today Merriam-Webster tracks (records) the words that people look up on their website and apps. And at the end of the year, they identify the words of the year, words that were looked up (searched for) more than others. There are two kinds: first, what we might call everyday words – words that are looked up frequently all year, every year.
The second kind are words that people looked up because of events in the news. After something happens – in politics, popular culture (music, television, movies, etc.), or sports – the number of times people look up these words spikes (goes up suddenly). A short time later, the number drops. When we look at these words, they often tell us what people think or how they feel about those events. Surreal belongs to this second group.
Surreal describes something that is very strange, unreal, or difficult to understand, like something from a dream. It comes from the world of art. Surreal art – like the photo of Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Time – shows usual objects in unusual ways. Watches are usual. Hanging watches over tree branches and other objects are unusual. Common synonyms for surreal include unbelievable, fantastic (from fantasy; imagined but not real), unreal, and unusual.
Surreal spiked several times in 2016. The first was in March after the terror attack in Brussels, Belgium. It appeared twice in July – after the coup attempt (attempt to take control of the government) in Turkey and after the terror attack in Nice, France. The last and largest spike came after the U.S. presidential election. All of these were events that people had trouble understanding, describing, and thinking about.
Some other words had significant spikes during 2016. The musician Prince’s death last year sent many people to the dictionary to look up icon – someone many people know about and consider an important person. The Revenant, the movie that Leonardo DiCapro starred in and won an Academy Award for, caused many to look up the word revenant – a ghost or someone who has come back from being dead.
Did any events from 2016 send you to the dictionary? What did you look up?
~ Warren Ediger – ESL tutor/coach and creator of the Successful English website.
This post was based on information from the Merriam-Webster website.
Photo of Persistence of Memory courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
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It’s All About “I”
Posted on Tuesday - January 24, 2017 by Dr. Jeff McQuillan
Have you ever wondered why some words in English are capitalized (in big letters; type of letters at the beginning of sentences) and some words are not?
Lucy has written about this topic before (see a couple of interesting posts here and here), but we recently received a question from Philipp in Switzerland asking why the pronoun “I” is capitalized, while other pronouns such as you, we, he, she, and it are lower case (written in small letters). Here’s a brief explanation.
From around 700 to 1200 A.D., people in England used different forms of English from the English we use today, what we now call “Old English” and “Middle English.” Old English was heavily (greatly) influenced by the Anglo-Saxons of German heritage who conquered (defeated and took control of) Britain. In Old English, and later in Middle English, the first person singular pronoun — “I” — was spelled “ic” or “ich.” In Old/Middle English, this pronoun was not capitalized.
Over time, the pronunciation of “ic” or “ich” changed and the “c” or “ch” were dropped (removed; deleted). The written form changed to match (be the same) and became just “i.”
But people who produced manuscripts (texts; written language) didn’t like the stand-alone (by itself; not with anything else) letter. It looked strange. It looked like a mistake. It looked like it should be part of another word, or like a misspelled (spelled incorrectly) word.
So the scribes (people who copied written texts before the invention of printing) made the letter taller, and it eventually lost its dot (the small circle mark above). By the 1200s and 1300s, the capitalized “I” was widely used.
At first, there was a distinction (difference made) between the “I” at the beginning of a sentence, which was bigger, and the “I” that appeared in the middle of a sentence. But over time, that distinction disappeared and people simply used the same “I” for everything. That’s the “I” we use today.
But language is constantly changing. Who knows? When we are finally conquered by the Canadians, perhaps we’ll all speak like Justin Bieber, eh? I hope not to live that long, though.
~ Jeff
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Rescued By The Pineapple Express
Posted on Tuesday - January 31, 2017 by Warren Ediger
It’s either feast or famine.
Feast refers to a large meal, especially one that celebrates something, like a wedding. Famine refers a shortage (too little) of food, often so much so that people suffer or die because they do not have enough to eat.
Today we use the phrase feast or famine as a metaphor to talk about situations when there’s either too much of something or too little.
When I wrote about California’s drought (a long time with little or no rain) in 2014, it was three years old. It continued for three years more. Our water supply became dangerously low. Most of our reservoirs, large lakes for storing water, were nearly empty. So much of our underground water had been pumped out (purposely removed) that the ground above it dropped (fell down) in some places. The snow in the mountains that provides our water when it melts in spring and early summer didn’t come, and when it did, it didn’t last long. It was the driest five-year period (length of time) in almost 140 years. It was, you could say, a water famine.
Today, in contrast, we are experiencing a feast of water, almost too much water. Our water year – the date we begin to measure rain and snow each year – begins October 1. Since last October, Los Angeles has received more than 200% – twice as much – of the amount of rain we usually get during the first few months of our water year.
Our reservoirs aren’t full yet. But nearly all of them are at or above their average level – the amount of water they usually contain from one year to another for many years. The snowpack (snow that collects on the ground) is deeper than it has been; we’ll know how much deeper on April 1, when scientists measure it. One area, near Yosemite National Park, has received 20 to 30 feet (6 to 9 meters) of snow!
What happened? How did five of the driest years in history become one of the wettest? The answer, or at least part of it, is the Pineapple Express.
The atmosphere is the envelope (surrounding layer) of oxygen and other gases around the earth. In the atmosphere above the eastern Pacific Ocean, there’s a powerful air mass (large amount of) that often pushes winter rain and snow storms away from California. If it doesn’t break up (into pieces) or move, we don’t get rain or snow.
This year, this air mass has broken up, moved around, and opened the door for the Pineapple Express to bring rain and snow to California.
What is the Pineapple Express? Think of it as a river in the atmosphere that starts near Hawai’i – that’s why we call it the Pineapple Express, since pineapples are grown there. As it travels from Hawaii, it collects water which, when it arrives in California, becomes rain and snow storms that may last for several days, resulting in large amounts of rain and snow. This year the Pineapple Express has been busy.
If you’d like to see a good example of how much rain we’ve received, visit the KQED Science website, where you can look at satellite photos of three of our reservoirs. You can use your mouse or finger (on a tablet) to move the control back and forth to see how much water there was a year or two ago and how much there is today. I think you’ll agree: it looks like we may be moving . . . from famine to feast.
~ Warren Ediger – ESL coach/tutor and creator of the Successful English website.
Photo of Shasta Dam courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
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