[Repost] How to keep an English conversation going (by Clare from english-at-home)

How to keep an English conversation going

It can be difficult to keep a conversation going. Even if you understand what the other person is saying, you can feel “blocked” or “frozen” when it’s your turn to speak. The words or phrases you need don’t often come quickly enough to mind.

The more opportunities you can get to use and speak English, the easier it is to find the right words when you need them. Take every chance you get to use your English! See How to practise your English for lots of ideas to find speaking opportunities.

Sounding fluent and confident in a few words

Here are some useful ways to keep the conversation going. The “secret” is that you don’t actually need many words to do this!

1. Show interest in the other speaker
You don’t need to say much. Often just one word is needed to show you are interested and listening. Try “Really?” (with a rising intonation), “Right” or “Sure”. You could even show you are listening with a non-word such as “Mmm” or Uh-huh”.

“I hate watching rubbish on the TV.”
“Right.”

2. Use a short phrase to show your feelings
For example, “How awful”, “Oh no!”, “You’re joking”, “What a pity” etc.

“My neighbour had a car accident yesterday.”
“Oh no!”
“Yes, but thankfully he wasn’t hurt.”
“Mmm.”

3. Ask a short question
You can use an auxiliary verb to make a short question which will encourage the other speaker to keep talking:

“We tried out the new Chinese restaurant last night.”
“Did you?”

“I’m going to Barbados next week on holiday.”
“Are you? Lucky you!”

“It’s snowing again.”
“Is it?”

4. Repeat what the other person said
Do this especially if the other person has said something surprising.

“He won £200 on the lottery.”
“£200!”

“I’m going to Barbados next week.”
“Barbados!”

Other ways to avoid silence

Here are some more tips to help you say something – even if you haven’t understood the other person or there’s nothing else to say.

If you don’t understand

“Sorry, I don’t understand.”
“Sorry, could you repeat that?”
“Sorry? I didn’t get that.”

If you don’t know the word

“I can’t find the word I’m looking for…”
“I’m not sure that this is the right word, but…”
“What I want to say is…”

If you can’t find the word immediately

You don’t want to be completely silent, but you need time to find the words.

“Well…”
“OK…”
“So…”

You can even make some “noises”

“Hmmm…”
“Uh-huh”
“Umm…”

Agreeing with the other person

You want to show that you agree, but you don’t have anything else to say.

“Yeah.”
“Right.”

Changing the subject

Everyone in the conversation has given an opinion, and now you want to talk about something else.

“Anyway,…”
“Well, as I was saying…”
“So, back to …”
“So, we were saying …”

Rephrase

Sometimes we say things that other people don’t understand, or we give the wrong impression. Here are some expressions you can use to say something again.

“What I meant to say was…”
“Let me rephrase that…”
“Let me put this another way…”
“Perhaps I’m not making myself clear…”

Go back to the beginning

If you’re explaining something, and you realise that the other person doesn’t understand, you can use the following phrases:

“If we go back to the beginning…”
“The basic idea is…”
“One way of looking at it is…”
“Another way of looking at it is…”

For more help with English conversations and speaking, see Better English speaking skills.

[Repost] Social Media Terminology for Any Social Media Plan (by Yasheaka Oakley)

Social Media Terminology for Any Social Media Plan

For your convenience, this list of social media terms used in reporting and measurement will be updated when new standards are released from credible resources that specialize in research, measurement standardization, and training for public relations and marketing professionals, such as (but not limited to) the Coalition for Public Relations Research, the Institute for Public Relations, and other industry leaders.

You may be familiar with some of these terms if you use social media channels, such as, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+ or LinkedIn for business purposes. Using these terms or similar terms can help small businesses or nonprofit organizations gain a basic understanding of social media reporting, and it is suggested that professionals interested in public relations, social media, and marketing become familiar with them, and empower their clients to understand the importance of metrics other than “Likes” and “followers,” so please feel free to bookmark this page and revisit this list often as updates become available.

Items
An item of content is a post, micro-post, Tweet, article, or other instance appearing for the first time in a digital medium.

Total Count
Used to identify instances where data is based on the total / aggregated amount of occurrences.

Unique Users
Used to identify instances where data is based on an individual user, visitor, or recipient of an item or specific content.

Mention
A mention refers to a specific reference in an item of a brand, organization, campaign, or other entity that is being measured or analyzed.

Target Audience
A specific group of consumers from your target market that is being targeted during a specific campaign. The target audience can be the same as a brand’s target market, but a target audience can be more defined to include demographics and segmentation criteria, such as: age, location, gender, income level, education level, ethnic background, lifestyle, etc.

Engagement
This term addresses the questions of how many individuals were exposed to an item and then took some additional action. Engagement is defined as some action beyond exposure and typically occurs in response to an item published on an owned channel. This metric could be related to clicks, likes, comments, shares, votes, +1s, retweets, video views, content embeds, etc.

Reach
This term addresses the number of individuals that might have been able to see, read, or hear a communications item. It represents the total number of unique users who had an opportunity to see an item or a valid reproduction of that item across digital media. Includes the number of people who visited your page, or saw your page, or one of its posts in news feed or ticker. These can be people who have liked your Page and people who haven’t. (Unique Users)

Impressions
The number of people who might have had the opportunity to be exposed to a story that has appeared in the media. Impressions are also known as an “opportunity to see” (OTS) and do not equal awareness since it relates to the number of times and item was displayed or the number of individuals who may have viewed or been exposed to an item and isn’t based on an action taken by the message recipient. Includes the number of times your posts were seen in news feeds or ticker or on visits to your page. These impressions can be by people who have liked your page and people who haven’t. (Total Count)

Page Stories
The number of stories created about your Facebook page. (Total Count)

Total Likes
The total number of people who have liked your Facebook page. (Unique Users)

Yasheaka Oakley

With years of experience in the higher education and nonprofit sectors, Yasheaka Oakley is the owner of YOakleyPR, a woman-owned small business that provides public relations, social media, and online marketing support services to 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations in Southeastern Pennsylvania, Southern New Jersey and Delaware.

[Repost] 13 Words You Probably Didn’t Know Were Coined By Authors (by Paul Anthony Jones)

Previously shared on fb by Las 1001 Traducciones

Cf. original piece http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-anthony-jones/13-words-you-probably-did_b_4795071.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

Paul Anthony Jones

Become a fan Author, writer, musician

13 Words You Probably Didn’t Know Were Coined By Authors

Posted: 02/20/2014 8:03 am EST Updated: 02/20/2014 8:59 am EST

Etymology Language Twitter Books News Books Words Word Origins Charles Dickens Shakespeare Dr. Seuss Yahoo!English Language Books News

Last month, HuffPost Books put together a list of 13 Words You Probably Didn’t Know Were Invented By Shakespeare. Amongst them were such everyday terms ascourtship, critical, gloomy, laughable, generous and hurry. Although debate rages about whether Shakespeare actually coined these terms himself or was merely the first person to write them down, it is at least likely that a fair proportion of the 1,700 words and phrases his works provide the first evidence of were indeed his. (And given that his Complete Works includes only around 30,000 different words in all, that’s still around 1 in every 30.)

But Shakespeare isn’t the be-all and end-all of course (that’s another of his by the way). English has had its fair share of literary giants over the years who, from Chaucer and Milton to Dickens and even Dr. Seuss, have each contributed words to our language. Here are 13 words that authors coined:

Boredom
If you’re not a fan of his books then it’s probably no surprise that Charles Dickens is credited with inventing the word boredom in his classic 1853 novel Bleak House. Dickens’s works also provide the earliest records of the words cheesiness, fluffiness,flummox, rampage, wagonful and snobbish — although snobbishness was invented by William Thackeray.

Chortle
A combination of “chuckle” and “snort,” chortle was coined by Lewis Carroll in his 1871 novel Through The Looking-Glass. Carroll, like Shakespeare, is celebrated for his linguistic inventiveness and coined a vast number of similar expressions (which he termed “portmanteaux”) that blend together two pre-existing words, includingfrumious (“fuming” and “furious”), mimsy (“miserable” and “flimsy”), frabjous(“fabulous” and “joyous”), and slithy (“slimy” and “lithe”).

Dreamscape
A name for the imagined location in which a dream takes place, the worddreamscape was coined by Sylvia Plath in her 1958 poem, “The Ghost’s Leavetaking.” One of the 20th century’s most important female writers, Plath also invented the words sleep-talk, windripped, sweat-wet and grrring, which she used in her short story The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit to describe the sound of alley-cats.

Freelance
The earliest record of the word freelance in English comes from Sir Walter Scott’s 1819 novel Ivanhoe. Whereas today it describes a journalist or similar worker employed on a project-by-project basis, it originally described a mercenary knight or soldier with no allegiance to a specific country, who instead offered his services in exchange for money.

Knickerbocker
The name of both a type of loose-fitting breeches (knickerbockers) and an ice cream (a knickerbocker glory), on its first appearance in English the word knickerbockerwas a nickname for someone descended from the original Dutch settlers of New York. In this context, it is derived from a pseudonym of Washington Irving, author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, who published his first major work, a satirical History of New York, under the alias Diedrich Knickerbocker in 1809.

Nerd
Although there is some debate as to where the word nerd comes from — one theory claims it comes from Mortimer Snerd, a dummy used by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen in the 1940s and 50s, while another claims it is a reversal of the word “drunk” — more often than not it is credited to Dr. Seuss, whose 1950 poem If I Ran The Zoo provides the word’s first written record.

Pandemonium
Nowadays we use pandemonium to mean simply “chaos” or “noisy confusion,” but given that its literal translation is “place of all demons” this is a pretty watered-down version — in fact it was coined in 1667 by the English poet John Milton, who used it as the name of the capital of Hell in his epic Paradise Lost.

Pie-hole
The earliest written record of the word pie-hole, a slang name for the mouth, comes from Stephen King’s 1983 novel Christine. Admittedly however, this is something of a grey area as it’s questionable whether King actually coined the word himself.

Robot
The word robot was first used in the play R.U.R. (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”) written by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek in 1920, and first translated into English in 1923. Čapek in turn credited the word to his brother, Josef, who presumably based it on the Czech word robotnik, meaning “slave” or “worker.” Unlike today, in the play Čapek’s robots were not automated machines but rather artificial “people” made of skin and bone but mass-produced in factories, who eventually revolt against mankind to take over the world.

Tintinnabulation
Tintinnabulation, another name for “a ringing of bells,” is credited to Edgar Allan Poe, who, appropriately enough, used it in a 1831 poem called “The Bells.” Other words Poe’s works provide the first record of include sentience (in The Fall of the House of Usher, 1839), multicolor (in the short tale The Landscape Garden, 1842) andnormality (in Eureka, 1848).

Twitter
The works of Geoffrey Chaucer provide the Oxford English Dictionary with more first attestations of English words than any other writer. Like Shakespeare, it is difficult (if not impossible) to ascertain which of these 2,000+ words Chaucer actuallyinvented and which were already in use before he wrote them down, but twitter, supposedly onomatopoeic of the sound of birds, is almost certainly his.

Unslumbering
If one 20th century writer above all others rivaled Shakespeare’s linguistic creativity, it was Thomas Hardy. Unslumbering, meaning “in a state of restlessness,” is probably one of the most straightforward and most useful of his inventions, with more outlandish Hardyisms including outskeleton, blast-beruffled, discompose and evenunbe (the opposite of “be”). In fact, Hardy himself once commented, “I have looked up a word in the dictionary for fear of being again accused of coining, and have found it there right enough — only to read on and find that the sole authority is myself.”

Yahoo
It might be one of the world’s biggest corporations today, but the word yahoo has its more humble origins in Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift’s 1726 adventure story in which the “Yahoos” are a race of dangerously brutish men. Within just a few years of its publication, the name yahoo had been adopted into English as another word for any equally loutish, violent or unsophisticated person.

Based on material taken from Haggard Hawks & Paltry Poltroons and@HaggardHawks.

Follow Paul Anthony Jones on Twitter: www.twitter.com/HaggardHawks

[Repost] 7 Sentences That Sound Crazy But Are Still Grammatical (by Arika Okrent)

7 Sentences That Sound Crazy But Are Still Grammatical

Arika Okrent

filed under: grammar, Lists

IMAGE CREDIT:

NATIONALGRAMMARDAY.COM

Martha Brockenbrough, founder of The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, started National Grammar Day in 2008. Since then it has been held every year on March 4th, a date that also happens to be a complete sentence (March forth!). It is celebrated in various ways: There is a haiku contest, an anagram unscrambling contest, and even an official song.

That’s all good clean fun. Some people, however, like to use the holiday as an excuse to engage in what Kory Stamper calls “vigilante peeving.” Stamper, a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster who knows from good grammar, dreads the way the holiday seems to encourage the shaming of others for their mistakes, or, as she calls it, “asshattery in the name of grammar.” (Read the whole thing. It’s worth it.)

This Grammar Day, let’s not look at grammar as a cold, harsh mistress. She can also be a fun, kooky aunt. Here are some tricks you can do to make crazy sounding sentences that are still grammatical.

1. ONE MORNING I SHOT AN ELEPHANT IN MY PAJAMAS. HOW HE GOT INTO MY PAJAMAS I’LL NEVER KNOW.

Take advantage of the fact that the same sentence can have two different structures. This famous joke from Groucho Marx assumes that most people expect the structure of the first part to be

One morning [I shot an elephant] [in my pajamas].

But another possible, and perfectly grammatical, reading is

One morning [I shot] [an elephant in my pajamas].

2. THE HORSE RACED PAST THE BARN FELL.

Make a garden path sentence. In this one, we think we’ve reached the main verb when we get to “raced,” but instead we are still inside a reduced relative clause. Reduced relative clauses let us say, “the speech given this morning” instead of “the speech that was given this morning” or, in this case “the horse raced past the barn” instead of “the horse that was raced past the barn.”

3. THE COMPLEX HOUSES MARRIED AND SINGLE SOLDIERS AND THEIR FAMILIES.

Another garden path sentence, this one depends on the fact that “complex,” “houses,” and “married” can serve as different parts of speech. Here, “complex” is a noun (a housing complex) instead of an adjective, “houses” is a verb instead of a noun, and “married” is an adjective instead of the past tense of a verb.

4. THE RAT THE CAT THE DOG CHASED KILLED ATE THE MALT.

Make a sentence with multiple center embeddings. We usually have no problem putting one clause inside another in English. We can take “the rat ate the malt” and stick in more information to make “the rat the cat killed ate the malt.” But the more clauses we add in, the harder it gets to understand the sentence. In this case, the rat ate the malt. After that it was killed by a cat. That cat had been chased by a dog. The grammar of the sentence is fine. The style, not so good.

5. ANYONE WHO FEELS THAT IF SO MANY MORE STUDENTS WHOM WE HAVEN’T ACTUALLY ADMITTED ARE SITTING IN ON THE COURSE THAN ONES WE HAVE THAT THE ROOM HAD TO BE CHANGED, THEN PROBABLY AUDITORS WILL HAVE TO BE EXCLUDED, IS LIKELY TO AGREE THAT THE CURRICULUM NEEDS REVISION.

Another crazy center-embedded sentence. Can you figure it out? Start with “anyone who feels X is likely to agree.” Then go to “anyone who feels if X then Y is likely to agree.” Then fill out the X and Y. You might need a pencil and paper.

6. BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO.

Buffalo! It’s a noun! It’s a city! It’s a verb (meaning “to intimidate”)! We’ve discussed thenotorious buffalo sentence before, but it never stops being fun. It plays on reduced relative clauses, different part-of-speech readings of the same word, and center embedding, all in the same sentence. Stare at it until you get the following meaning: “Bison from Buffalo, New York, who are intimidated by other bison in their community, also happen to intimidate other bison in their community.”

7. THIS EXCEEDING TRIFLING WITLING, CONSIDERING RANTING CRITICIZING CONCERNING ADOPTING FITTING WORDING BEING EXHIBITING TRANSCENDING LEARNING, WAS DISPLAYING, NOTWITHSTANDING RIDICULING, SURPASSING BOASTING SWELLING REASONING, RESPECTING CORRECTING ERRING WRITING, AND TOUCHING DETECTING DECEIVING ARGUING DURING DEBATING.

This sentence takes advantage of the versatile English –ing. The author of a 19th century grammar guide lamented the fact that one could “run to great excess” in the use of –ing participles “without violating any rule of our common grammars,” and constructed this sentence to prove it. It doesn’t seem so complicated once you realize it means,

“This very superficial grammatist, supposing empty criticism about the adoption of proper phraseology to be a show of extraordinary erudition, was displaying, in spite of ridicule, a very boastful turgid argument concerning the correction of false syntax, and about the detection of false logic in debate.”

Not only is this a great example of the wonderful crazy things you can do within the bounds of proper English, it’s the perfect response to pull out the next time someone tries to criticize your grammar.

Sources of sentences: 1. Groucho Marx; 2. Bever (1970); 3. Wikipedia; 4. Chomsky & Miller(1963); 5. Chomsky & Miller (1963); 6. William Rapaport; 7. Goold Brown (1851).

Primary image courtesy of NationalGrammarDay.com.

March 4, 2013 – 10:06am

Cf. original piece @ : “http://mentalfloss.com/article/49238/7-sentences-sound-crazy-are-still-grammatical”

Seen on fb, source: HelpTraduzioni