Good Job, i am interested

fwally99@gmail.com

Thanks a lot, Mr Olawoye. The issue for me is not all about getting the expressions right, but that when I'm involved in a conversation with someone, I tend to misfire somehow. Can this be helped?

talk2kuns@yahoo.com

interested segzee , felixfred15@yahoo.com

I really pity exam markers these days with the advent of text-speak. Students who are used to this mode of writing subconsciously write them in exams.

Imagine sending an email to your boss or a client and going thus;

Aw r u 2day?

The contents(if any) of your messsage would have been devalued before reading.

How many times have we heard people say STILL YET.

Nice one OP!

toluxa1:

Most English words that begin with Ex are actually pronounced IK e.g Example, Explain, Examination. Some pronounced as EK are Extent, Excellent.

You are right. But I'm sure you mean ig-zam-pl.  

A very good and interesting thread.
@poster, here is my e-mail add. pls am also interested.
nas_amm@hotmail.com[[/b]

Grammar no be money, i will employ you to be my personal Sec.

maxtop:

Grammar no be money, i will employ you to be my personal Sec.

Seriously, everything is not about money. Do you know why the world dont respect Mr George Bush?

me too worldstar2020@yahoo.com

My email : ohakwejoel@gmail.com

You think English is easy?
1) The bandage was wound around the wound. 

2) The farm was used to produce produce.

3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.

4) We must polish the Polish furniture.

5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.

6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert,

7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.

8. A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.

9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.

10. I did not object to the object.

11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.

12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.

13) They were too close to the door to close it.

14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.

15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.

16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.

17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.

18) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.

19) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.

20) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?

Let's face it - English is a crazy language!
There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren't invented in England or French Fries in France,  Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.

We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth, beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?

Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell?

How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which, an alarm goes off by going on, 

English was invented by people, not computers and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all. That is why when the stars are out they are visible but when the lights are out they are invisible.

PS. - Why doesn't 'Buick' rhyme with 'quick'?

This is very NICE Olawoye.

Cheers

Here's another!

There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that is 'UP'.

It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP? At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?

We call UP our friends. And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver; we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car,  At other times the little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses. To be dressed is one thing, but to be dressed UP is special.

And this UP is confusing: A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP. We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.

We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP! To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4th of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions. If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time  but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP.  When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP! When it rains, it wets the earth and often messes things UP.
When is doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP.

One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now my time is UP, so, it is time to shut UP!

Oh . . . one more thing:

What is the first thing you do in the morning & the last thing you do at night?  U-P!

True story – In the early 90s, I wanted to explain the basis of a fuel subsidy to my boss and I most have said “fuel” like 5 times and he still didn’t understand me until I spelt it out. I was saying “Fu ell” instead of “F yul.”

The problem most 9jas have is that we were thought to pronounce every single syllable in a word.

Poster you try wella. There was this form we had to fill in school for our year book and I actually saw '' most favorite song ''. If it's your favorite it's your favourite.

Even the government makes mistakes , there are no such words as
Enumerator
Parastatal
Majorly

@ Wallie : Do you know 'verb' is a noun ?

@Apocalypse - Yeah, there are verbs that could be used as nouns and they are called gerunds. What are you trying to say about "most favorite song"?

You're also wrong about enumerator, parastatal, and majorly, the words do exist. Moreover, you can become your own lexicon, at least in the legal world, as long as you define the words.

Thanks alot

Na wa o! See me see Mind Your Grammar for Nairaland. . .

Na wa o! See me see Mind Your Grammar for Nairaland. . .

Tanx 4 d notification.my email is olga605@bk.ru,pls also send an english dictionary if u hav.tanx

Abeg Olawoye, I dey here too. netcruise@live.com.
Thank you

olawoye mine is tobounty_int@yahoo.com

Without pointing fingers, just because you can grammatically string words together correctly does not mean that you should because the “flow” might not be proper (sounds funny).  If you have cologne that smell like poop, it might not be poop but chuck it, nonetheless!

The real art/difficulty in writing mostly has to do with sentence construction and clarity. In other words, choosing the right set of words to express yourself makes all the difference when writing.

Disclaimer: I’m not an expert in English language but I dey try small small; after all, English came to Africa on a boat!

@Olawole,

what a great job! I am impressed.

The best trend ever. Please my mail is

avbuerehn@yahoo.com

ASK not AKS (esp in pronunciation). I make this mistake a lot and my oyibo friends r yabbing me toooo much

Thanks for ur great effort. I am interested in improving myself. dr_alao@yahoo.com

olawoye thanks for ur thread. Pls send me a mail on how to improve my english. dr_alao@yahoo.com

i wrote an error-and-mistake book on this in 1998. i still have some copies left. i dreamt it up just to survive then. well done, guys.

Good job there. But I have to say that oral English is poorly taught in many countries. It is also not our mother tongue. You learn a language by imitation.
You basically learn to pronounce things the way you hear people say them. If your dad has several degrees and still says SI NAIT, it's going to be hard to know it's wrong. Our schools don't have good language labs, so even English Language graduates, who go on to become teachers, cannot even pronounce things properly.

I know of a Nigerian lady here in London who used to believe that she had superb diction until she arrived in here. She said people could hardly understand her English initially.
Some of the things you mentioned like more better, more bigger, are actually used to emphasize and exaggerate things by Caribbeans and are not not meant to be proper English.
Social network culture is not helping things. With stuff like dunno, lemme, gr8t, c u, and so on, kids of today will struggle to spell things properly.

@poster assent??
anyway about d short codes we use in txt msges, i must say dt i am very much guilty of dt. it almost put me in serious trouble in my last examination as i had to always cancel my wrong spellings. it made my answer booklet very rough.
i spelt this as ds
called as calld
how as aw
you as u
are as r
be as b
reason as rzn
and so on
am so used to it. am changin nway bt are we to be blamed, we always wanna compress a 2-page txt msg to a page