Vocabulary Exercises

1. Find the words that match the definitions in the column below. Then write the word next to the correct definition.

New words: colleagues, destitute, to scrape, to bellow, to bawl, to clutch, to nap, disingenuous, to shuttle, to assault, a horde, a monologue, purports, ambivalent.

Definitions

1. to sleep for a short period of time

2. a great number

3. having opposite feelings at the same time

4. associates

5. a discussion with oneself

6. very, very poor; totally lacking

7. to attack

8. to hold tightly

9. claims

10. to remove a thin layer

11. lying

12. to go back and forth

2. Write the definitions below the underlined words in the sentences.

Definition

a cleaning tool, to treat harshly, neighborhood known for destitute alcoholics, begging/solicitation, done what he promised, many police arrests, increased police activity, a circle drawn around words to indicate speech, relieved of anxiety/saved from a difficult situation, became annoyed about.

1. Giuliani promised to get tough on begging and he has delivered.

2. He ordered police sweeps of the squeegee men.

3. The police have announced a crackdown on subway panhandling.

4. The ad contains a thought balloon.

5. The author bridled at being told how to think about a private decision.

6. He resented being let off the hook so easily.

Directions: Choose a team, either pro or con. Conduct a debate on the controversy surrounding the topics below.

Each team member will choose one of the following roles in arguing the team’s case.

1. Enforced hospitalization of the mentally ill homeless

PROS CONS

Mayor Koch Robert Levy, attorney

Psychiatrist from Bellevue Billie Boggs

Restaurant owner at 65m St. psychiatrist

Sister of Billie Boggs civil right advocate

passerby passerby

2. Advertising against panhandling in N.Y. subway system

PROS CONS

Mayor Giuliani panhandler (s)

passenger (s) policeman

MTA official passenger (s)

policeman advocate for homeless

John Ezard don’t be frit, local dialects are alive and thriving

A bemused regional, national and world public is to get its first authoritative guide through the maze of English dialect words next month.

It tells where you should deploy the insult “addle-headed”, where you should call a female cat a “betty-cat” and it pinpoints the area which nurtured Lady Thatcher’s famous jibe against the Labour Party - “frit, frit, frit”.

The new dialect map shows that “frit” comes from a sliver of central England stretching down not only from Grantham, the baroness’s birthplace, but from Nottinghamshire through Buckinghamshire almost to the Greater London border.

It is, the guide discloses, one of the most ancient of words, the elsewhere disused past tense of the Old English verb “to fright”. Similar words, so rarely used that they have dropped off the map, are “fritted” in Rutland and “fritten” in Shropshire. Two Old Norse words still on the map, “flayed” and “scared”, would have sprung to Lady Thatcher’s lips had she been raised in the North or on the East Anglian coast. They date from Viking invasions.

Of the two commonest current “frit” words, “frightened” was coined only 300 years ago and “afraid” is Norman. “Afeared” is the oldest English word.

These examples come from one of 90 pronunciation and dialect word maps in An Atlas of English Dialects, to be published by Oxford University Press on September 15.

The book’s moral is that dialect is astonishingly live and well in England, despite the standardishing trends of television, newspapers, modern communications and mobility. “That these forces are weaker than the forces working for the growth of dialect is an important feature of the history of the language,” it says.

The atlas shows how words jump regional and county boundaries. “Goosegog”, for gooseberry, crops up in small pockets of Merseyside, the Bristol area, Dorset and east Devon. “Addle-headed” is listed only in Somerset and Gloucestershire. “Betty-cat” is purely East Anglian.

The book is the fruit of the Survey of English Dialects, which began collecting words from 313 mainly rural areas in 1948. The survey focused on elderly, rural, uneducated speakers little influenced by radio or television.

Though fieldwork ended in 1961, scholars have updated it with regional surveys.

The authors say dialect has proved “quite remarkably tenacious”.

“Every time someone says that dialect has all gone, this is countered by new evidence that it persists.” Professor John Widdowson, of Sheffield University’s centre for English cultural tradition and language, said last night.

“A lot of young people still use it. It’s amazing that it does survive, although in some areas it has been quite dramatically eroded”.

The centre would like to do new fieldwork to carry the survey into the next century.