Oxford Capacity Analysis

Some of the earliest double entendres are found in the Exeter Book, or Codex exoniensis, at Exeter Cathedral in England. The book was copied around 975 AD. In addition to the various poems and stories found in the book, there are also numerous riddles. The Anglo-Saxons did not reveal the answers to the riddles, but they have been answered by scholars over the years. Some riddles were double-entendres, such as Riddle 25 ("I am a wondrous creature: to women a thing of joyful expectation, to…

When ELL students are in school, they spend most of their time sitting in class and listening to and following directions from their teachers, which helps them to improve their listening, reading, and vocabulary capacities. However, when it comes to production of language such as speaking and writing, they don’t do as well. To have a grasp of any skill, one first needs to learn, then practice to get better at it. The learning part is up to me as a teacher; I am trying…

William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night alludes to a variety of themes that commonly include false identity, role-playing, and love. The general plot of the play could be described as a cross-dressing comedy about a woman, Viola, who tries to gain the attention and love of a Duke, Orsino, with obstacles along the way, including Olivia, the Duke’s love interest. The themes mentioned are developed and sometimes scrutinized by the play’s characters, such as Orsino, Olivia, and Feste the clown. In…

Another bad experience that made me the writer I am now, was the English class I took my senior year. Everyone painted senior year to be the easiest year of all and that the teachers are not as demanding since it is your last year. The completely opposite happened to me, of course, I had put myself through another high level class, this time it was not honors but AP! What the hell was I thinking? I had chosen to take an AP English class with Santa Claus. Santa Claus was my English teacher’s…

Today in 2016, we are still at a crossroad between racial identity and bondage. History has a strange way of repeating itself. Even though we made it through 250 years or Slavery, 90 years or Jim Crow, and 60 years of Segregation, we still are going through the same struggles in modern time. This systematic oppression of African Americans has been here far too long and it has been embedded into the American Culture. We are strong people born from super humans who survived the horrors or The…

Although Dr. Murray and Dr. Minor’s lives and circumstances were quite different, they had one tie which brought them together and cultivated a chance friendship: The Oxford English Dictionary. Their story is an extremely important one, especially when it comes to history,…

"Young lady, that is not proper! Where are your manners?". Why does it matter? I would think after being scolded for having my elbows on the table, not crossing my legs (whether in a skirt or not), or possibly making fart jokes. Does anybody even care, except for my grandmother? What I did not know at the time was that these small chidings were the slow steps of society molding me into their perception of proper. Proper is the complicated, dolled up character society pretends to be to impress…

In the first place, dictionaries with standardized and regulated words will help us maintain “conventions of usage” (Bryson, 1990, p.151). “We must agree to spell cat c-a-t and not e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t, and we must agree that by that word we mean a small furry quadruped that goes meow and sits comfortably on one’s lap and not a large lumbering beast that grows tusks and is exceeding difficult to housebreak” (Bryson, 1990, p.150). We seem to have so many names for the same items. Sub sandwich’s can…

surprising definition of balloon is fool. In Irish English, balloon is “a boast idiot.” Without doubt, language is ambiguous. Balloon is an object that produces happiness and which you can play with; even though, in Ireland, it is an insult. Words have power, their history shows the great changes that a word can have over time. One of the richest words that I found is flow, which later became flower. Flowers are important components in all events; I have used and received flowers innumerable…

Charles Demuth, called “Deem” by his friends, was the only child of Ferdinand and Augusta Demuth. When Charles was four, he fell and broke his hip. While he was bed-bound because of the injury, his mother presented him with his first art supplies. It was then that his love for art began. Charles' injury caused him to become lame. He was close to both parents, but especially to his mom because of his physical frailty. When Charles was at school, he hung out with the girls because they were not…