Following on from the success of the recent Radio 4 series “A History of the World in 100 objects“, linguist and novelist David Crystal attempts to do the same for the English language.  An interesting read for any and all language teachers and language historians out there!

From Riddle to Twittersphere: David Crystal tells the story of English in 100 words – Telegraph.

If you were looking for a particularly challenging lesson for one of your advanced classes…..   you could give them a selection of these words as a spelling test!  And then divide the list and the class into four or five groups and set them off to discover what their words mean (and provide contextual sentences!).

Or they could just choose their favourites.  Mine are numbers 43 and 49 – BODGERY and FOPDOODLE respectively.

 

 

(Thanks to Cherry M Philipose for sharing this via facebook)

Advertisement