English is the language of Shakespeare and the language of Chaucer. It's spoken in dozens of countries around the world, from the United States to a tiny island named Tristan da Cunha. It reflects the influences of centuries of international exchange, including conquest and colonization, from the Vikings through the 21st century.
Fredrik Sandberg/Scanpix fs dm/KS/Reuters "We haven't started using it at home yet, but it's just a matter of habit," says Sofia Bergman, a Swedish mother of two. "But it's a good thing if nurseries and schools use it." She's referring to hen, the new Swedish gender-neutral pronoun introduced at two Stockholm nurseries in 2012.
Posted on centenarynews.com on 17 November 2014 The UK supermarket chain, Sainsbury's, has drawn both criticism and praise for launching a TV advertising campaign featuring the First World War Christmas truce. Describing it as 'poignant,' Sainsbury's says the ad.
In the midst of deepening austerity, David Cameron is desperate to play the national card. Any one will do. He's worked the Queen's jubilee and the Olympics for all they're worth. Now the prime minister wants a "truly national commemoration" of the first world war in the runup to 2014 that will "capture our national spirit ...
Jared Diamond argued, in his 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel , that geography is fate. One thread of his theory sought to explain why societies in Eurasia developed more quickly than in the Americas and Africa.
This post first appeared at In These Times. It is not pleasant to contemplate the thoughts that must be passing through the mind of the Owl of Minerva as the dusk falls and she undertakes the task of interpreting the era of human civilization, which may now be approaching its inglorious end.
S.J. Garland holds degrees in History and English from Simon Fraser University and the City University, London. She is the author of the novel, "Scotch Rising" (2014). My grandmother was of Scottish descent, and my mother told me frequently she was so tight with money she squeaked when she walked.
This post first appeared at In These Times. In her previous books The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) and NO LOGO: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (2000), Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein took on topics like neoliberal "shock therapy," consumerism, globalization and "disaster capitalism," extensively documenting the forces behind the dramatic rise in economic inequality and environmental degradation over the past 50 years.
About a year ago, I wrote about some attempts to explain why anyone would, or ought to, study English in college. The point, I thought, was not that studying English gives anyone some practical advantage on non-English majors, but that it enables us to enter, as equals, into a long existing, ongoing conversation.
When you think about a sentence, you usually think about words - not lines. But sentence diagramming brings geometry into grammar. If you weren't taught to diagram a sentence, this might sound a little zany. But the practice has a long - and controversial - history in U.S. schools.
Any littoral state claims the area stretching 200 nautical miles from its coast. This area becomes an Exclusive Economic zone (EEZ). Complex bathymetry of the ocean marries the Law of the Sea to shape quite convoluted maritime borders. You can view an accurate representation of seabed or and hover over the disputed sectors.