via BoredPanda — a blog (mostly) about the beautiful things in life.
Monthly Archives: April 2016
The changing themes of commercials
Have a look at these three commercials. What has changed from the 1980s until today?
Lifestyle Sports discounter (Ireland), 1980s
Speak ‘n’ Spell (Texas Instruments), 1980s
Coca Cola, contemporary
A phone to feel good about?
Since we were talking about sustainable product design last week, discussing the need for longevity and repairability as well as social and environmental values becoming a natural part of doing business, there seems to be a cell phone accomplishing theses issues: the Fairphone 2. It’ s a modular phone, ethically produced, open and build to last.
The only point to raise questions is why the developers have chosen Android 5.1 Lollipop with Google Apps and Google Play Store as operating system. Sure there would have been alternate solutions…
How not to give a presentation
This is from a book called Career Express. A guy presents a laptop in the style of a Shakespearean drama.
Please don’t do that for your exams, or you’ll make me crack up and fall from my chair.
So what’s the problem with this speaker? He’s got the right expression, but he’s absolutely overdoing it. This is especially bad if you speak like Hamlet but make funny mistakes or use inappropriate vocabulary.
To sum up, you should use some expression, but don’t do anything that feels unnatural.
The story of stuff
The Story of Stuff is a series of videos about impacts of our consumer culture on people and the planet. Here’s one about electronic devices:
You will find more information on the Story of Stuff website.
A diamond among authors
So we talked about the history of business and trade. Which came first, money or markets, money or interest?
If you’re interested in human history in a broader context, more questions may pop up: Why have we stopped living as hunter-gatherers? Why and when did states evolve? Why did the Mayan and Greenland Viking Empires collapse but not Spain or China? Why did Europeans conquer native America and not the other way round? Why are most African countries notoriously poor while Europe and North America seem to be predestined for wealth? Is it because Africans are less bright than we are?
Jared Diamond, an American biologist and historian, has probed into these questions and gives surprising answers based on his broad knowledge of both natural sciences and society. His most famous books include: *
- Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
- Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
- The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
His books have also been translated into German, but if you want to improve your English, I’d recommend the original versions.
* I don’t want to imply that you should use Amazon. Search for these titles anywhere else, and you may find better offers.
The origins of English words II
William the
Conqueror dressed as a fish
The native inhabitants of Britain spoke Celtic languages, some of which still exist in the form of modern Irish, Gaelic (spoken in Scotland) and Welsh (spoken in Wales). At the same time, large parts of England were part of the Roman Empire, so the upper class would speak Latin.
Then, in the Early Middle Ages, came Germanic settlers called Anglo-Saxons and introduced their own culture, including vocabulary and grammar. They came as migrants rather than conquerors and mingled with the native population. That was when Old English developed as a language.
In 1066, William the Conqueror invaded England from Normandy and made Norman French the language of the upper class.
This is only a much simplified summary. You can find more detail in this video, if you’re interested:
But, as a result of this history, formal English still uses a lot of words derived from Latin and French, while informal speech makes extensive use of Germanic words. This is important to know when you have a choice between two or more translations of the same German word.
Here are some verb pairs with almost the same meaning:
Germanic (informal) |
French or Latin (formal) |
| ask | inquire |
| begin | commence |
| buy | purchase |
| choose | select |
| come | arrive |
| end | finish |
| go on | continue |
| help | assist |
| leave | depart, desert |
| watch | monitor |
The origins of English words
The origins of English words
Is business a typical English word? Or are enterprise and economy, for that matter? They all are, but they came from different sources. Business is related to being busy, an old Germanic word, while enterprise was originally a French word, and economy has come from the Greek language via Latin.
In fact, English has soaked up so much vocabulary from other languages that it has become the word-richest language in the world, according to most linguists. Some say that English has almost a million words today, ranging from awe to zoopharmacognosy. Even native speakers don’t know them all.