Quote:
Originally Posted by Tubby
I remember when I was at school, I used the word 'ain't ' The English teacher was constantly telling me
"Ain't, ain't in the English language ain't ain't."
I read somewhere that year (probably 1959) That the Oxford Dictionary had included the word 'ain't '- because of common usage.
The following week I deliberately exaggerated my regular usage, "I ain't got a pencil Miss. I ain't done my homework"
I desperately wanted to tell her "Ain't is in the English language ain't is"
No wonder the price of Dictionaries is sky rocketing. I use an illustrated Oxford dictionary, it has plenty of pictures. When you open a page it always has something interesting to look at. I have given them as birthday presents, it is a good format and people browse them.
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I remember being in elementary school and asking the teacher what a certain word meant that I hadn't learned yet. She directed me to look it up in the dictionary. While I wanted to know what it meant, to be frank, I really just wasn't THAT interested to stop reading, get up and go over to the massive Webster's dictionary to look it up. The teacher insisted that I go and look it up. So, naturally I had to, but I learned my lesson, never asked a teacher what a word meant again.
In the late 70s to early 80s there was a 'push' to go metric (which of course we should do), but of course growing up in the US, we 'grew up' with the English system, pounds, feet, inches, miles, ounces, gallons, etc, so we had absolutely no familiarity with the metric system. But the word simple math 'word' problems purposely put 'centimeters' / 'kilometers' - sometimes spelled out and sometimes abbreviated. Spelled out, the word is just too long to sound out for a 6 year old unfamiliar with the metric system and abbreviated just caused outright confusion. At that age, the teacher would typically call on a student to 'read out loud' and these things were major stumbling blocks, looking back on it now, its quite humorous:
3 cm becomes 3...c....m or 3 seem, or perhaps cream. If spelled out, centimeter would start out ok, because we would know 'cent', so it would be 'cent' I - [pause] met - er