Culturally Speaking: a taster

Can you believe we are once again already at the end of the academic year? How was it for you? I think many of us feel we have worked and worked, sometimes with immediate results and a sense of gratification, and often not. We’ve worked so hard to help our students – but have we left time and energy to help ourselves too? Have we given ourselves the little rewards we deserve, pushing our development and knowledge of English and Anglophone culture further, keeping up with English outside the classroom in the real world?

Here’s a little test to see how on top of things you are. Try to answer each question and once you are sure you have finished, go ahead and check the answer key!

The Quiz:

1) Which of the following sentences do you consider to be “correct” English?

1. If I would have known, I wouldn’t have gone

2. What do yous think of that?

3. Can I have a question?

4. Yeah, I’ve been there, in 1985.

2) Below are some words and phrases that have been coined or have become widespread in the last year or two. Match them to the example sentences / definitions. What do you think they mean, and how are they formed?

1. Permacrisis

2. Screenome

3. Ghost Flight

4. HOGO
   

1. A plane journey with no passengers, used by an airline so it does not lose its airport slot.

2. “Are you going to the party?” “I can’t be bothered to be honest, I’m going to stay in”

3. “My life is just one problem after another right now. I can’t catch a break”.

4. The culmination of the unique set of apps and websites an individual interacts with.

3) Here are two signs from different countries using English. Why are they amusing? What did they mean to say?

a)

b)

4) Watch this clip from Fawlty Towers, a beloved UK sitcom from the 1970s. In the clip, the hotel manager Basil Fawlty tries to catch a guest who has illegally sneaked a woman into his room. Which adjectives would you use to describe the clip and its type of humour? You can choose as many as you like:

situational	sophisticated	dated
British	satirical	farcical / slapstick

Are you ready to check?

Answer Key:

1)

1. Even though this seems to break the “rule” of no would in the if clause, it is increasingly standard, especially in American English.

2. This pluralisation of you is standard in many regional dialects of northern British English. An equivalent in some states in the US is y’all.

3. This is Hunglish, and seems strange in English. We would naturally say can I ask you something?

4. Technically this is incorrect: we don’t use the present perfect when the past time frame is made explicit by a past time adverbial, such as in 1985. However, the speaker seems to express two separate thoughts – their general experience (I’ve been there) and the specific “when” (in 1985). Although this feels non-standard, the transition between these is not always as clear in spoken English as it is in written English. The speaker may be saying Yeah, I’ve been there, pausing and then offering more concrete information in an elliptical way I went there in 1985. It’s therefore not impossible to hear such a sentence!

2)

1. = 2. A permacrisis is a continual sense of instability in one’s life (or the life of a country). It is a portmanteau formed by clipping and blending permanent and crisis.

2. = 4. Your screenome as indicated is the sum total of your use of technology, particularly through interacting with screens and apps. It used by scientists researching the influence of related technology on individuals and social groups. It is a portmanteau, blending screen and genome (i.e. the complete DNA of an organism).

3. = 1. Many new words emerge from news and economic trends, and ghost flight is one of them – it was revealed in the media recently that airlines are being forced to fly when massively underbooked, even passenger-free, in order to keep the time slots they have been allocated by airports. Such empty flights have become known as ghost flights, a noun + noun compound noun.

4. = 3. The acronym HOGO stands for hassle of going out and is inspired by the previous acronym FOMO (fear of missing out). It emerged post-pandemic when many people simply no longer had the enthusiasm to socialise and preferred to stay at home!

3)

1. There’s some unfortunate “collocational confusion” here. To have children in this context sounds like to give birth to children where of course they mean please do not bring children into the bar.

2. This is a lovely if unfortunate piece of creativity – un + bear + able is used with the intended meaning of ‘cannot be carried”...alas, the meaning of a lexical item in English (as in many languages) often differs in usage from its parts and unbearable means something closer to intolerable or deeply unpleasant.

4) This is somewhat subjective, of course, but I think you could apply all of the adjectives - except perhaps sophisticated! Fawlty Towers is still loved by many but is also considered rather dated, particularly due to the often xenophobic behaviour of Basil. That said, although it is not fully evident in the clip, it is satirical: the series uses Basil to satirise the small-minded aspirational snobbery of the English middle class. It is a good example of situational comedy, an early sitcom, as it is based around scenes stemming from the behaviour of the main characters (typically Basil’s irrational behaviour). This often results in farcical, slapstick situations, characteristic of many British comedies from the Middle Ages onwards.

In summary....

I hope you enjoyed this short quiz, and that you learned something from it.

If you did, why not consider treating yourself to our two-day Culturally Speaking course? Across six sessions we look at the kind of things the quiz was comprised of. For instance: what makes English “right or wrong”, how it is used and misused across the world, how social media is a hotbed for new expressions and idioms (often, the kind our students come across before us!) and commonalities and differences in areas of anglophone culture such as humour.

Go on, treat yourself!