Reading English Books Together

Are marriages made in heaven or do you have to put in a great deal of effort to make your relationship work? What is the basis of a happy marriage? Leo Tolstoy wrote:  “What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.” Problems are bound to confront you but your mutual readiness to handle both an apparently insurmountable difficulty and a minor snag will eventually bring you long-awaited harmony and you will join the ranks of happy families who are ‘all alike’, according to Tolstoy, because a happy marriage is a flawless marriage with every single problem solved and settled. The basis of a happy marriage… Can we use ‘base’ instead of ‘basis’? A language purist, who has very strong ideas about what is correct or acceptable, would say: ‘Definitely not! ‘Base’ is physical. You use ‘base’ to describe the lowest part of a column or a staircase. You can make a cocktail with a whiskey base and murderesses in crime...

For most of us happiness is the overriding aim in life but there is one formidable obstacle to achieving it – few of us have a clear CONCEPTION of what happiness is. For Socrates, a famous Greek philosopher, there was an inextricable link between a person’s well-being and knowledge.  You can become truly happy once you have rationally examined every aspect of your life and made sense of the world you live in. Socrates is supposed to have said: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’. Rational examination of your life is all about CONCEPTS. For example, you have chosen the career of a judge in the hope of promoting justice. Whether your decisions as a judge will make you happy or not will hinge on how clearly you have formulated the CONCEPT of justice. However, the answer to the question ‘What is justice?’ may elude you. What method did Socrates suggest for defining CONCEPTS ? Socrates’s mother was a midwife – she helped women to give birth to babies. Socrates comp...

When Gustav Klimt’s ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I’ was first shown to the general public in 1907, it must have IMPRESSED the viewers. The moment you see the portrait your eyes are riveted on the face of a strikingly beautiful young woman with a mysterious half smile playing on her lips. Yet, the gold background heavy with fabrics and decorative elements seems to have asserted dominance over her thus making her look detached and fragile. Gustav Klimt ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I’ Our perception of any painting is INFLUENCED by its life: conception, execution and any twists of fate it has undergone since the artist first displayed it. ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I’ also known as Austria’s Mona Lisa has an interesting history. To begin with, the author of the portrait, Gustav Klimt (1962-1918) was Austria’s most notable and fashionable avant-garde artist painting mostly women and enjoying the reputation of a Casanova.  GUSTAV KLIMT There is controversy as ...

Suppose you are stuck in a dead-end and boring job but you have done it for years and you can’t really imagine your life without having a friendly chat with your colleagues and going through your regular work routine. On the one hand, you are yearning for changes, but on the other hand, it is hard to leave behind something that has been part of your life for such a long time. How would you go about deciding whether to stay or to hand in notice? Why not flip a coin: heads or tails? If it comes up heads, you will quit. If it comes up tails, you will stay and put off taking this life-changing decision till next year. Which side of the coin is heads and which is tails? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work it out. Most coins have a side that shows the head of some prominent person. For example, all British coins have had a profile of the current monarch’s head since the 17th century and the most outstanding US presidents have been selected by Congress to appear on Ameri...

Did you know that if you decide to embark on a military career and enlist as a soldier you will be doing a job that comes third on the list of the worst jobs compiled by American researchers in 2014*?  Yet, Prince Harry, the grandson of Queen Elizabeth II, who did 10 years of full-time military service, including two stints on the front lines of Afghanistan, does not regret joining the armed forces. In 2015 he announced that he was resigning but added that he felt deep gratitude: ‘I consider myself incredibly lucky to have had the chance to do some very challenging jobs and have met many fantastic people in the process. ...The experiences I have had over the last 10 years will stay with me for the rest of my life." Prince Harry  By the way, what military rank does Harry have? He is Captain Harry Wales. It is higher than lieutenant [lefˈtenənt] but below major. The system of military ranks is one of the oldest hierarchies in the world and the word ‘rank’ is believed to de...

‘It is better to hitch your wagon to a star than to wander aimlessly through life.’ The sentence contains one of the most popular English sayings which comes to mind whenever we think about being ambitious and aspiring to achieve more. ‘Hitch your wagon to a star’, we say to someone encouraging him to be brave and to set optimistic goals. But what is the origin of this saying? In 1870 Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American lecturer, poet and essayist, published his essay ‘Civilization’ in which he wrote that a civilized man will move on to accomplish more and more complex tasks and he will use the powers of nature to solve problems at hand: ‘Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves. That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements. The forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire, serve us day by day, and cost us nothing. Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-...

Sometimes the name of a real person becomes the name of a thing, a place or an invention. The person gets forgotten but his name enters our day-to-day vocabulary describing something we cannot really do without. Who, for example, remembers James Thomas Brudenell, seventh Earl of Cardigan? Yet, when winter comes, most of us like to wear woolen knitted jackets that the seventh Earl of Cardigan designed and made popular. Whose names brought the words 'boycott' and 'hooligan' into existence? Read our post to find it out. Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott was an estate manager running the lands of Lord Erne in County Mayo, Ireland. His reponsibilities included collecting rent from the farmers who worked Lord Erne's land. He showed no mercy for those farmers who had no money to pay rent because of bad harvests. He was not to be persuaded to reduce rent payments or let them pay later. His only response to them was: If you cannot pay, give up the land.  As a result...

‘We are turning over a new leaf and if we put our shoulder to the wheel and keep our eye on the ball, we will enjoy success and never come back to the mundane life we used to have.’ What is an idiom? It is a fixed word combination whose meaning is not transparent. It creates a picture through which an idea is communicated to you. Can you find 3 idioms in the first sentence of this news item? Why study idioms? There are at least three valid reasons: a. to sound more interesting E.g. Which sentence sounds better: It is easy. or It is a piece of cake? b. to give importance to what you are saying, to make it more expressive Compare: His new film failed. or His new film sank like a stone. c. to break the ice or bring a smile to another person’s face: The film was so boring – like watching paint dry Can you add more reasons to the list? Test yourself on the commonest English idioms. Choose the right answer: 1. If you don't have any plan, you are going to play it by ...  ...