ENGLISH CORNER

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  • It’s So HOT In Here!

    Everyone, in every language, refers to temperature, probably multiple times a day, whether referring to themselves, the weather (particularly the British!), or without necessarily realising it or any presence of noticeable physical temperature (read on for this last one). Let’s begin with the basic words hot and heat; the difference between the adjective and the noun is merely a change of vowels. This alteration of an internal vowel is known as an ablaut inflection. It is a very ancient trait of Indo-European languages which has all but disappeared from most modern languages although it is still quite common in English.  Thus we have sit, sat and seat, raise, rise and rose, draw and drew and many others. The entire process seems so natural to speakers of English that Americans invented the word dove (as in swimming pool, not as in aviary) as the past tense of dive. (The British word is dived.)

    Another ablaut inflection is Het, being the past tense of the verb to heat.  So, to get all het up is to become “all heated up”. A heat meant the same as a heating. Thus a cookery book of 1430 instructs us to “sette it on the fire an giffe it an hete” where we might have said “set it on the fire and give it a heating”. This sense of heat led to its use in racing. Before racing a horse it would be given a preparatory run. Today, we would refer to this as a “warming-up exercise” but in the 16th century it was called giving the horse a heat (i.e. “a heating”). In time, any preliminary run before a final race became known as a heat and when two runners cross the finish line together it is called a dead heat.

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English Corner Archive

  • It’s So HOT In Here!

  • The Wild West

  • One Man Went To Mow, Went To Mow A Meadow

  • The Wild West

    When you hear words like ‘cowboy’, most people will immediately conjure up images from the old Western movies, of rough, tough and handsome men, who shoot first and ask questions later, before riding off into the sunset with their ‘gal’ by their side. It shouldn’t surprise you too much to learn that real life in…

    Read more: The Wild West

  • One Man Went To Mow, Went To Mow A Meadow

    Sorry to disappoint you but the title might suggest that we were going to reveal the long lost origin of the nursery rhyme, but sadly this will remain lost in the mists of time; however, we are going to examine the word meadow, and it’s origin, as it leads on to a series of interesting…

    Read more: One Man Went To Mow, Went To Mow A Meadow

  • High Tea

    Dinner is, for most English speakers, the main meal of the day. When the word was first used (in the 12th century) it referred to a midday meal, but it did not remain so for long. By the early 16th century it had become the first meal of the day, what we would call breakfast.…

    Read more: High Tea

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  • Names Of Elements

    A slightly different English Corner this time, where we look at a type of name rather than a specific phrase. The Periodic Table, or table of elements, is a chart that organizes all known chemical elements by their atomic number, with rows called periods and columns called groups. This arrangement is based on the number…

    Read more: Names Of Elements

  • Clutching At Straws

    It is only since the mid-19th century that we have been clutching at straws. Even more recently, the ‘grasp at straws’ version has become commonplace, especially in the USA. Prior to that, desperate people would ‘catch at a straw’. That usage of ‘catch’ was commonly used in medieval England, by which was meant ‘obtain/achieve’; for…

    Read more: Clutching At Straws

  • Mind your P’s and Q’s

    This was the very first “English Corner” that appeared in the 3rd October 2008 issue of AWOL, and is republished here as both a nod to the past and part of our pre-launch testing. The image is a new addition. An expression with several origin stories, but its meaning is to pay attention to details.…

  • AWOL

    As this is the first English Corner to appear in the Hua Hin Citizen Journal, we thought it quite appropriate to give a brief history and etymology of the phrase that was the name of our printed predecessor, along with the thought process and the other possibility that was considered back in the heady days…

WEIRD NEWS

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  • Lost On The Bus
    WHERE IS MY INFLATABLE DINOSAUR COSTUME?

    We have probably all left something behind on occasion, but when you leave it on a bus, its not always so easy to retrieve it. When you are the bus company though, you accumulate a lot of expected items, like bags and brollies (umbrellas for US readers), but also some quite odd ones. A British bus company has revealed the most unusual items to wind up in its lost and found in 2025 included a box of fortune cookies and an inflatable dinosaur costume (main image but not the actual item; attribution – JMacPherson from Calgary, Canada, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

    The Oxford Bus Company said its customer service department logged a total 4,387 lost and found items in 2025, and 1,013 of those items — about 23 percent — were returned to their owners. The transit company said the most unusual items to cross the customer service desk included a bag of rubber ducks, a box of fortune cookies, an inflatable dinosaur costume, a baby bonsai tree, a potato with googly eyes, a jar of pickled onions, a bicycle tire, a 22-pound bag of rice, several Nerf guns and a yoga mat covered with inspirational quotes.

    (more…)

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Weird News Archive

  • Lost On The Bus

    WHERE IS MY INFLATABLE DINOSAUR COSTUME?

  • Man Swallows Fabergé Egg Pendant In Alleged Theft

    POLICE WAITING ON “FOR YOUR EYES ONLY” EVIDENCE

  • Convicted murderer sues to be able to eat Vegemite

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  • “I am the Ambassador of Westarctica”

    An Indian man has been arrested by police in New Delhi after he had been found to be running a fake “embassy” from a rented residential building near the capital. The cops also recovered cars with fake diplomatic plates. Harshvardhan Jain, 47, had apparently duped people for money by promising overseas employment, said senior police…

  • Danish Zoo causes outrage among small pet owners

    When it’s time for your beloved pet bunny, Fluffy, to end their time on this mortal coil, most pet owners will, with slightly moist eyes, likely bury them and plant something above them to remember them by. But Aalborg Zoo has their eyes on your soon to be departed pet, and their Facebook post (above)…

  • When is a bone not a bone?

    Apparently, in Ohio, when it is in a “boneless chicken wing”, according to the state’s Supreme Court. They recently ruled in a case where a diner sued a restaurant, Wings on Brookwood, after ordering boneless wings with parmesan garlic sauce, which then led to serious medical complications, and doctors found a long, thin bone had…

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