INTRODUCTION
Where did it all go? Everything we learned at school now seems a distant memory. We sit slack-jawed when our children ask us which planet comes after Jupiter, or what the capital of Bulgaria is, or what
quid pro quo actually means. Have you ever found yourself making up your own version of the Pythagorean theorem in order to avoid the humiliating scorn of your offspring? Have you ever started blithely on a list of the thirteen original colonies only to find yourself stuck at eight? Have you ever succumbed to the temptation to use the embarrassing cop-out clause “Ask your father/mother”?
Even simple queries like “Why is the sky blue?” have many parents scratching their heads. All we can remember is that we used to know the answer. A recent study revealed that even though most pupils learn French for five years, by the time they are adults the sum total of their knowledge stretches to–at best–four words. In these days of highspeed Internet connections and calculators on cell phones, we rarely have to use the information that was drummed into us in our school days. The good news is that it’s still all there. And even better, it’s surprisingly easy to revive those dormant gray cells and hold your head up with pride when you’re next asked to help with homework.
Homework for Grown-ups is a revision guide for adults that will put you back on track. We aim to entertain you as well as exercise your brain and equip you with the basics, so you can impress your friends or handle home work without humiliation.
Homework for Grown-ups is organized into nine chapters, each covering a school subject: English, Mathematics, Home Economics, History, Science, Religious Education, Geography, Classics, and Art. After reading it, we hope you’ll be as sharp as a tack, as bright as a button, and as clever as when you were a fresh-faced youngster in gray socks and a blazer.
Wouldn’t it be great to slip a couple of Latin phrases into a conversation with your boss, or pontificate on the qualities of a tetrahedron at a cocktail party, or name all the presidents in your head while the
dentist is giving you a filling?
Homework for Grown-ups is the way to get back your self-respect and also show the kids a thing or two.
Chapter 1:
ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
“
English n. the language of England, now used in
many varieties throughout the world”
Oxford Concise English Dictionary
“For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809—92),
In Memoriam A. H. H.
Our mother tongue is a rich and flexible beast. It contains such beauteous and varied words as “tatterdemalion,”* “punch,” “vulpine,”† “mendacious,”‡ “croak,” “badger,” “Saturday,” and “snow.” It has the power to communicate a huge spectrum of emotions in a compact, vague phrase (“I love you,” “I’m not sure about that”) and also to express accurately very specific notions (“He’s a little ochlophobic,”§ “Pass me the potassium permanganate”). The shapes and sounds of our words are
hugely varied, often depending on whence our magpie language has picked up specific terms: the vowel-heavy, melodic “anaesthesia,” “echo,” and “chaos” from the ancient Greek; the concise, muscular “belch,” “night,” and “cow” from our Anglo-Saxon forefathers; and the sleek “cuisine,” “blonde,” and “rendezvous” from the French, for example.
Today English is an official language of more than fifty countries, including Madagascar, Belize, Fiji, and Singapore and is spoken by more people on Earth than any other. The
Oxford English Dictionary contains definitions for more than 500,000 words in current use (some studies record more than 900,000 English words), and the average person probably uses about 1/60 of these in their lifetime. More impressively, Shakespeare’s vocabulary is reckoned to have run to over 24,000 words.
In order to appreciate properly the wonderful works of literary giants like Shakespeare, or indeed to create your own, it is vital to have a basic grasp of how the language works. Grammar provides the building blocks from which the castles of great literature are built.
We are extremely lucky to have such a rich heritage of literature in our language to turn to–whether John Milton, Jane Austen, or James Joyce is your thing. Literature can educate, console, amuse, enrage, challenge, move, and even morally guide (as long as one reads “improving books”). Your reading could be made up of the instructions for the windshield wipers on your car or it could be the poetry of T. S. Eliot, but either way you need to understand your language and its literary heritage to get the best out of the world.
*A ragamuffin † Like a fox ‡Untruthful § Afraid of crowds
ENGLISH LANGUAGE
WAYS WITH WORDS:
THE BASIC RULES OF GRAMMAR
As we have seen, there are thousands of words to choose from in our generous language, but it may surprise you to learn that there are only nine
kinds of words (although in some circumstances a word can belong to more than one class).
1.
Nouns are “naming” words. They name people, places, or things. There are three kinds of noun:
Proper nouns are specific names of people and places and are written with capital letters at the start of them: “America,” “Danny.”
Abstract nouns are things or concepts that you can’t touch: “shyness,” “romance,” “happiness.”
Common nouns are the words for everything else: “car,” “jacket,” “cinema.”
2.
Verbs are words indicating action or change: “to sing,” “to kiss,” “to be,” “to eat.” Many verbs have a basic root form and usually different endings are added to this root depending on the subject of the verb and the tense: “I dance,” “he dances,” “they dance,” “I danced,” “he danced,” “they danced.”
The
subject of a verb is the person or thing who is carrying out the action of the verb and the
object of a verb is the person or thing that the verb is being carried out upon. In the sentence “Danny kissed
Sandy,” “Danny” is the subject, “kissed” is the verb, and “Sandy” is the lucky object.
In order to express some of the different tenses (present, future, past, etc.), a verb can become a
verb phrase, incorporating auxiliary verbs to indicate timing. For example, in the sentence “Danny had been kissing Sandy,” “had been kissing” is a verb phrase.
There is a particular subgroup of auxiliary verbs called
modal verbs, such as “may,” “must,” and “can.” These express how likely or possible an event is. In the sentence “Danny can kiss Sandy,” “can” is the modal verb.
3.
Adjectives are words that modify and describe nouns. In “the shiny car,” “shiny” is the adjective. Adjectives can themselves be modified, in which case they become
adjectival phrases: “the impressively shiny car.”
4.
Adverbs tell us how, where, or when something is done. In other words, they describe the manner, place, or time of a verb. Many adverbs are created by adding “ly” to the end of an adjective: so
“slow” becomes “slowly.”
5.
Pronouns are the words that replace nouns in a sentence. Pronouns like “he,” “which,” “none,” and “you” are used to make sentences less cumbersome and less repetitive. Without pronouns we would end up with childish sentences like: “Danny took liberties with Sandy at the drive-in, so Sandy slapped Danny and left Danny.”
6.
Conjunctions are used to link words, phrases, and clauses, as in: “I want the burger
and the milkshake,” or “Tell me
when you are ready.”
7.
Articles are very easy to remember as they consist only of “a,” “an,” and “the.” “A/an” is the
indefinite article–it can refer to any member of a group: “
A boy kissed her.” The
definite article is used when the specific subject is known: “
The boy kissed her.”
8.
Prepositions link nouns, pronouns, and phrases to other words in a sentence. Prepositions usually indicate relationships in space or time. Examples are “under,” “above,” “behind,” “from,” “with,” “at,” and “for.”
9. An
interjection is a word added to a sentence to convey emotion. It is not grammatically related to any other part of the sentence. Interjections are often followed with an exclamation mark. Examples are “
Ouch, that hurt!” and “
Hey! Leave me alone!”
SATISFYING SENTENCES
When speaking we are often regrettably casual in our manner and fail to communicate in complete units of sense–also known as sentences. It is natural for oral communication to sometimes consist of fragments, or even of hand gestures and grunts, but for clarity on the page we should attempt to write in full sentences (unless of course one is composing an experimental surrealist haiku or some other advanced form).
Sentences are made up of one or more
clauses...
