E. Foley - Homework for Grown-ups: Everything You Learnt at School...and Promptly Forgot

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Englishn. the language of England, now used in many varieties throughout the world

Oxford Concise English Dictionary

For words, like Nature, half reveal

And half conceal the Soul within

A LFRED , L ORD T ENNYSON (180992), In Memoriam A. H. H.

Our mother tongue is a rich and flexible beast. It contains such beauteous and varied words as tatterdemalion, Pass me the potassium permanganate). The shapes and sounds of our words are hugely varied, often depending on whence our magpie language has picked up specific terms: the vowel-heavy, melodic anaesthesia, echo, and chaos from the ancient Greek; the concise, muscular belch, night, and cow from our Anglo-Saxon forefathers; and the sleek cuisine, blonde, and rendezvous from the French, for example.

Today English is an official language of more than fifty countries, including Madagascar, Belize, Fiji, and Singapore and is spoken by more people on Earth than any other. The Oxford English Dictionary contains definitions for more than 500,000 words in current use (some studies record more than 900,000 English words), and the average person probably uses about 1/ of these in their lifetime. More impressively, Shakespeares vocabulary is reckoned to have run to over 24,000 words. In order to appreciate properly the wonderful works of literary giants like Shakespeare, or indeed to create your own, it is vital to have a basic grasp of how the language works. Grammar provides the building blocks from which the castles of great literature are built.

We are extremely lucky to have such a rich heritage of literature in our language to turn towhether John Milton, Jane Austen, or James Joyce is your thing. Literature can educate, console, amuse, enrage, challenge, move, and even morally guide (as long as one reads improving books). Your reading could be made up of the instructions for the windshield wipers on your car or it could be the poetry of T. S. Eliot, but either way you need to understand your language and its literary heritage to get the best out of the world.

WAYS WITH WORDS: THE BASIC RULES OF GRAMMAR

As we have seen, there are thousands of words to choose from in our generous language, but it may surprise you to learn that there are only nine kinds of words (although in some circumstances a word can belong to more than one class).

Nouns are naming words. They name people, places, or things. There are three kinds of noun: Proper nouns are specific names of people and places and are written with capital letters at the start of them: America, Danny. Abstract nouns are things or concepts that you cant touch: shyness, romance, happiness. Common nouns are the words for everything else: car, jacket, cinema.

Verbs are words indicating action or change: to sing, to kiss, to be, to eat. Many verbs have a basic root form and usually different endings are added to this root depending on the subject of the verb and the tense: I dance, he dances, they dance, I danced, he danced, they danced.

The subject of a verb is the person or thing who is carrying out the action of the verb and the