University College, Oxford

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…

courage, the fidelity, and the dedication to update the American language. Noah webster was born on October 16, 1758, in the capital of Connecticut, Hartford. Noah grew up in an everyday, average colonial family, however, Noah was able to go to college at Yale in 1774,…

A synonym is defined as a word or phrase that means the same or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language. Throughout the history of the English language, several synonyms appeared around the Middle Ages after the Norman invasion of England. Although England’s new leaders communicated through the Norman French language, the native inhabitants of England continued to speak Old English which resulted in Norman and Saxon-derived synonyms. With the later invention of the…

It’s understandable that many people will see the new slang as destroying English, but it’s not it’s simply the new era of words that are popular at that time and place. The language has changed throughout many era’s and it can be shown on the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) which is a very cool resource and allows one to see how far the English language has come and where it continues to…