Clipmarks | Nouns Clips

Pic-lits

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:15:25 GMT

clipped by: teacherina
clipper's remarks: Artistic way of creating sentences for artistic photos. Cool activity for ESL.

Clip Source: piclits.com

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CREATE DRAG-N-DROP or FREESTYLE

NOUNS

ADJECTIVES

ADVERBS

VERBS

UNIVERSAL

Today's word of the day: Hendiadys

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:52:07 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: A "hendiadys" (fr. Gk. "one through two") is a literary figure in which a pair of concepts in a subordinate relationship are presented as conjoined. Examples: "nice and warm" instead of "nicely warm"; "sound and fury" instead of "furious sound"; "pain and toil" intead of "painful toil"; and so forth. First spotted in Robert Alter's footnote to Genesis 5.29.

Clip Source: en.wikipedia.org

Hendiadys

Hendiadys (a Latinized form of the Greek phrase ἓν διὰ δυοῖν hen dia duoin 'one through two') is a figure of speech used for emphasis — "The substitution of a conjunction for a subordination". The basic idea is to use two words linked by a conjunction to express a single complex idea.

The typical result is to transform a noun-plus-adjective into two nouns joined by a conjunction.

For example, "sound and fury" (from Act V, Scene V of Macbeth) seems to offer a more striking image than "furious sound". In this example, as typically, the subordinate idea originally present in the adjective is transformed into a noun in and of itself.

"The kingdom and the power and the glory" (from the Lord's Prayer) extends the principle, transforming the idea of a "glorious, powerful kingdom" into a sequence of three nouns joined by conjunctions.

Tags: language, literature, words, bible, cie100

Attack of the killer ravens: Flocks are suddenly slaughtering lambs

Mon, 05 May 2008 10:50:09 GMT

clipped by: michellezm
clipper's remarks: "Research published last year in the Scientific American also showed the raven to be one of the most intelligent species on the planet - up there with dolphins and apes and, unlike most other birds and animals, capable of learning from their own actions and from observing others' behaviour.

They're thought to be one of the few birds that can count, and some have even learned to fashion leaves into special tools for extracting grubs from crevices in trees.

In Japan, they were reportedly found dropping nuts onto a dual-carriageway, then darting down to eat them once the cars had cracked them open.

Although older ravens (they live up to 25 years) mate for life and travel in pairs, young birds may form flocks of up to several hundred - collective nouns for ravens include an "unkindness", a "conspiracy", and a "murder" - which swoop on farm animals"

Clip Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

these sinister looking birds are feasting on something far larger - newborn lambs.

And instead of hanging around for a few discarded bones or a forgotten carcass to pick and claw at, they've started killing live farm animals - by pecking them to death, in horrific scenes reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier's The Birds, turned by Alfred Hitchcock into one of the most chilling movies of all time.

Throughout Britain, traumatised farmers have reported a sudden and disturbing rise in the number of livestock being attacked by ravens.

According to Johnny Hall, of the National Farmers Union of Scotland, it's no longer just lambs: "Raven attacks have become a huge problem across a wide area of the country.

"We have substantial evidence of them attacking adult sheep and calves, too

The question is, why have ravens suddenly started to attack livestock?

some believe it is simply the pressure on food resources caused by the dramatically increasing raven population

Thumbing through the dictionary

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:58:08 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth

Clip Source: www.ironicsans.com

Thumbing through the dictionary

I recently noticed how many body parts have made the leap from noun to verb. Here are a few things you can do with your body parts as verbs:

Shoulder the burden.
Face the music.
Arm yourselves!
Foot the bill.
Stomach an awful movie.
Finger the suspect.
Elbow a pushy jerk on the subway.
Neck with your girlfriend.
Tongue her if she’ll let you.
Bone her once your parents go to sleep.
Mouth along with the music.
Head out of here.
Skin a cat.
Scalp the cat’s owner.
Back out on your commitment.
Eyeball the hot girl at the club.
Hand over your cash.
Knee a mugger in the nuts.
Thumb your nose at the President.
Heart New York.
Butt out.

Tags: english, language, nouns, verbs, words, slang

Interesting facts about the Japanese Language

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 04:48:53 GMT

clipped by: chris49
clipper's remarks: Why more info on site

Clip Source: www.kt70.com

Interesting facts about the Japanese Language

Is there anything easy about Japanese?

No verb conjugation!
No gender of nouns!
No articles (a, the)
Number (singular and plural) not important and barely exists!
Not hard to learn to pronounce as there are only 48 sounds consisting of 5 vowels and 11 consonants!
Syntax or the word order of a sentence, excepting the final verb, is totally free!

Why then is Japanese considered difficult to learn?

The written language has 3 methods of writing: Thousands of Chinese characters called Kanji and 2 Japanese syllabaries of 48 characters each called Hiragana and Katakana. Japanese is therefore considered the most complex written language in the world. In order to get barely by, you need to learn all of the Hiragana and Katakana and at least a few hundred Kanji.

So learning Japanese is almost like learning the vocabulary of 2 languages at once!

Top 10 Rules of Punctuation

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 14:43:23 GMT

clipped by: CrazyRedHead
clipper's remarks: I; HATE! it when people: misuse simple, punctuations?!?!?!

Clip Source: listverse.com

10. Comma

Use commas to separate independent clauses in a sentence

The Oxford Comma

I love apples, pears, and oranges.

9. Period

There are stylistic differences here.

8. Question Mark

One thing to be careful of is to not include a question mark when it is not needed:

WRONG: I wonder how many people will come to the party?

7. Exclamation Mark

Two or three exclamation marks in a row is completely unnecessary.

6. Quote Marks

Punctuation with quotations

5. Colon

A colon should be used after a complete statement in order to introduce one or more directly related ideas

4. Semicolon

Use a semicolon to join related independent clauses in compound sentences.

3. Apostrophe

The apostrophe has three uses:

1) to form possessives of nouns
2) to show the omission of letters
3) to indicate certain plurals of lowercase letters.

2. Parentheses

Parentheses are occasionally and sparingly used

1. Dash

Hyphen

Use a hyphen with the prefixes

You should also use a hyphen to avoid confusion in a sentence:

He had to re-sign the contract

Tags: punctuation, grammar, english, language, writing

Girl, You'll Be A Woman

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 11:57:53 GMT

clipped by: debbyski

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

AT 8 or 9 years old, the typical American schoolgirl is perfecting her cursive handwriting style. She's picking out nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in sentences, memorizing multiplication tables and learning to read a thermometer.

She's a little girl with a lot to learn.

And yet, in increasing numbers, when girls this age run across the playground in T-shirts, there is undeniable evidence that their bodies are blossoming. The first visible sign of puberty, breast budding, is arriving ever earlier in American girls.

Some parents and activists suspect environmental chemicals. Most pediatricians and endocrinologists say that, though they have suspicions about the environment, the only scientific evidence points to the obesity epidemic. What's clear, however, is that the elements of female maturity increasingly are spacing themselves out over months, even years -- and no one quite knows why.

Tags: sooner, than, expected

What Does the English Language Look Like?

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 01:54:32 GMT

clipped by: Djiezes

Clip Source: www.readwriteweb.com

What Does the English Language Look Like?

Clip Source: people.csail.mit.edu

80 Million Tiny Images

Clip Source: www.readwriteweb.com

Have you ever wondered what the English language looks? Yeah, neither have I. But a group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and New York University did, and tapping into the billions of images freely available on the Internet, they came up with a visual map of the English language using nearly 80 million of those images. The images are arranged based on the semantic relationship between words, and thus, according to the researchers, the project explores "the relationship between visual and semantic similarity."

The researchers started by locating images for all 75,062 non-abstract nouns in the English language (though, to be honest, some of them seem pretty abstract -- Ulaanbaatar, for example?). For each noun, the researchers found multiple images, they then combined the images into an average (sort of a blob of colors) that represents that word visually. They used 79,302,017 images in total.

Tags: language, english, visualization, map, photos, images, mit

Word Trivia

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 22:16:35 GMT

clipped by: Jaycer17

Clip Source: dictionary.reference.com

a lazy person's set of epithets: drotchel, drumble, affler, loblolly, lollard, lollpoop, scobberlotcher, ragabash, faineant, and flutch

a special word is used for the cry, call, or sound of many animals: apes gibber; asses bray; bears growl; beetles drone; bulls bellow; calves, sheep, and lambs bleat; cocks crow and crows caw; cows and oxen low; deer bell; eagles, vultures, hawks, and peacocks scream; falcons chant; guinea pigs and hares squeak; ravens croak; sparrows chirp; swallows twitter

between 1500-1650, about 10,000-12,000 words were coined, of which about half still exist

by the time children enter school, they command 13,000 words; a typical high school graduate knows 60,000 - a literate adult, twice that

coined by Shakespeare (to name a few): alligator, dawn, lonely, drug, eyeball, undress, puke, domineering, inaudible, pander, amazement, leapfrog, bedroom, hint, submerge

if you notice in etymologies that some German words are capitalized, it is because they are nouns

Tags: english, trivia

The Elements of Style - William Strunk, Jr.

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 13:10:07 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: The entire 1918 edition — online, searchable, and beautifully laid out. This impeccably-written English usage book is as much fun to read for its lively tone and witty examples as it is for its timeless advice. Strunk approached grammar not as a rigid rule set to be followed, but as a craft to be mastered and enjoyed. It's no accident that "Strunk & White" (as the reference is now known) is still read, essentially unchanged, in classrooms and newsrooms to this day.

Omit needless words.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

(The Elements of Style. III. 13.)

Clip Source: www.bartleby.com

The Elements of Style

William Strunk, Jr.

Asserting that one must first know the rules to break them, this classic reference book is a must-have for any student and conscientious writer. Intended for use in which the practice of composition is combined with the study of literature, it gives in brief space the principal requirements of plain English style and concentrates attention on the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated.

CONTENTS

Bibliographic Record Frontmatter

ITHACA, N.Y.: W.P. HUMPHREY, 1918
NEW YORK: BARTLEBY.COM, 1999

Tags: english, usage, form, style, grammar, spelling, rules, strunk, strunk and white, elements, language, writers, writing, writer, tool, reference, words, punctuation, syntax

Don't Write Like An Idiot

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 19:19:00 GMT

clipped by: bignosemousie
clipper's remarks: This is a reclip of an older clip that Invictus made. His original exceeded the current clip limit so I couldn't revive it.

Refresher everyone.

Clip Source: web.centre.edu

You may not notice it yourself, but if you don't know the difference between YOUR and YOU'RE, you come across as an idiot whenever you use them. They are not interchangeable, and neither are THERE, THEIR, and THEY'RE, nor any of the examples explained below. As more and more communication takes place online and in writing, through chat, email and messaging, certain common misspellings of words and contractions have become dangerously frequent, reinforcing their repeated misuse. This page doesn't aspire to make you a decent writer, or even a competent speller. It only seeks to keep you from making an ass of yourself.

YOUR ≠ YOU'RE

ITS ≠ IT'S

THERE ≠ THEIR ≠ THEY'RE

*NEW* ACCEPT ≠ EXCEPT *NEW*

NOUNS ≠ NOUN'S

WHO'S ≠ WHOSE

KNOW ≠ NO ≠ NOW

TOO ≠ TO ≠ TWO

OUR ≠ ARE

WHERE ≠ WE'RE ≠ WERE

AFFECT ≠ EFFECT

Tags: spelling, grammar, writing, common mistakes, english language, write.better.look.smarter

Nine brands that made it to everyday conversations

Sat, 08 Sep 2007 06:28:23 GMT

clipped by: haraya
clipper's remarks: A collection of nine brands/trademarks that are so popular that they made it to Oxford Dictionary as nouns. There should be more...

Clip Source: www.socyberty.com

Hoover

Xerox

Thermos

Prozac

Spandex

Jello

Tampax

Band-Aid

Viagra

Tags: names, noun, brands, advertising, dictionary, language, trademark, collection, list, communication

Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 11:59:33 GMT

clipped by: Deepti

Clip Source: www.reuters.com

About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.

And if you've got a problem, don't be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby)

Researchers examined a corpus of more than 2 billion words, consisting of full sentences that appeared in newspapers, books, Web sites and blogs from 2000 onwards.

For the most part, the dictionary dropped hyphens from compound nouns, which were unified in a single word (e.g. pigeonhole) or split into two (e.g. test tube)

Formerly hyphenated words split in two:

fig leaf

hobby horse

ice cream

pin money

pot belly

test tube

water bed

Formerly hyphenated words unified in one:

bumblebee

chickpea

crybaby

leapfrog

logjam

lowlife

pigeonhole

touchline

waterborne

Tags: hyphens, language, dictionary, words, english

Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 00:27:51 GMT

clipped by: thekay

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on

LONDON (Reuters) - About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not really sure what they are for

Another factor in the hyphen's demise is designers' distaste for its ungainly horizontal bulk between words.

hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography

the dictionary dropped hyphens from compound nouns, which were unified in a single word (e.g. pigeonhole) or split into two (e.g. test tube

There are places where a hyphen is necessary

Formerly hyphenated words split in two:

fig leaf

hobby horse

ice cream

pin money

pot belly

test tube

water bed

Formerly hyphenated words unified in one:

bumblebee

chickpea

crybaby

leapfrog

logjam

lowlife

pigeonhole

touchline

waterborne

Tags: typography, linguistics, english, spelling

-ous

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:07:15 GMT

clipped by: msujason08
clipper's remarks: Now that I have been given a satisfactory understanding of grammar, I am being introduced to linguistics.

Clip Source: dictionary.reference.com

a suffix forming adjectives that have the general sense “possessing, full of” a given quality (covetous; glorious; nervous; wondrous); -ous and its variant -ious have often been used to Anglicize Latin adjectives with terminations that cannot be directly adapted into English (atrocious; contiguous; garrulous; obvious; stupendous). As an adjective-forming suffix of neutral value, it regularly Anglicizes Greek and Latin adjectives derived without suffix from nouns and verbs; many such formations are productive combining forms in English, sometimes with a corresponding nominal combining form that has no suffix; cf. -fer, -ferous; -phore, -phorous; -pter, -pterous; -vore, -vorous.

Tags: learning, linguistics