Fewer or Less?

Supermarkets have been getting it wrong!

When you queue up with your basket in the "10 items or Less" aisle and look at the sign, you are observing a basic grammatical error.

The sign should read 10 Items or FEWER.

This is because we use "FEWER" for something we can definitely count e.g. "There are fewer than 3 chickens in the coop"

You use LESS when you can't specify the quantity eg "there is less air than before in the tyre".

After pressure from the Campaign for Plain English, Tesco is changing their signs to "Up to 10 Items", thus avoiding annoying people like me complaining about their bad grammar! You can read about it here. If you want more grammar hints, you can visit this lovely clear site.

Guardian Children's fiction prize 2008

The longlist for the Guardian's annual Children Award has been announced. Going to the link here will give you reviews and descriptions of all the books listed. I haven't read any of them yet, but I will be checking some of them out over the summer holidays to read. The ones i like the look of include
The Bog Child by Siobahn Dowd (her earlier book A Swift Pure Cry is one of my favourites),
before i die by Jenny Downham,
Bad Blood (looks spooky!) by Rhiannon Lassiter
and The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

There is a competition open to under 16s . All you have to do is write a review of not more than 200 words on one of the longlisted books and submit it, with an entry form, to the Guardian.

Spelling reform- how do you spell fish? G-H-O-T-I*

In Portugal, the government has voted to change how the language is spelt to make it more logical. All silent letters (the equivalent of our k in 'knight' or the w in 'write') are now banished. Could something like that ever happen here? Guardian columnist Marcel Berlins seems to think it should:

" Many thousands of other English words bear the burden of unpronounced consonants, whose only function is to confuse schoolchildren into even more spelling mistakes than is their custom. For instance, a recent report found that only around half of English 11-year-olds could correctly spell the word doubt. A survey a few years ago concluded (I could have told them and saved them the money) that the more a word was spelled like it was pronounced, the more likely it would be spelled correctly.

There is no reason why we should not copy their example. Instead of bemoaning children's waning spelling aptitudes, and blaming teachers, syllabuses and the malign effect of text messaging, let us put the blame where it belongs: an insane spelling system. I am not suggesting we impose a completely new alphabetical structure on English orthography, as George Bernard Shaw and others have advocated. Shaw's proposed alphabet was a complicated affair, almost impossible to learn. The Portuguese way is more of a tidying up operation, eliminating incongruities and inconsistencies. We could do the same, with the help of a few English profs, and if we ended up with a lot of seudo-sychopaths with soriasis and siatica writing a senario about rathful sychologists rapping reaths rongly - well, at least schoolchildren will be spelling better.

*How do you pronounce the word spelled "ghoti"? The answer is "fish" - the "gh" as in laugh, the "o" as in women, the "ti" as in motion."

If this seems tricky to you, think how tough it must be to learn English as a second language!

Spelling

Spelling has been in the news a lot lately, so to test your skills here is a fiendishly hard quiz.

Shamefully, I only got half of it right, so it is back to the dictionary for me!

Guardian spelling quiz

Another important thing to learn is the correct spellings of homophones(words which sound (phone) the same (homo) but are spelled differently. The BBC has a quiz where you can check your skills

BBC Homophone quiz

Frankenstein

Many of you have enjoyed reading the story of Frankenstein, and now know a bit more about this famous story. The original novel was written in 1816 by an 18 year old Mary Shelley as a result of a story telling contest. The internet has many resources to do with this novel. You can read the original here, or if that is too daunting, a good summary can be seen on this site.

Thomas Edison (who invented the light bulb!) made a short film in 1910 about Frankenstein. Obviously the quality is not that of today's films, but it makes for an interesting 12 minutes!

A Shakespeare game online

The BBC has a fantastic MURDER MYSTERY Shakespeare game called the Seven Noble Kinsmen for you to play online. It has over 2 hours of game play and lots of mini games. You have to become a member bbc online which is very easy (and free!). You can also find out which male or female Shakespearean character you are most like.

This site has 4 games to play

• How well do you understand Elizabethan English? Test your brain with the SAT—Shakespeare Aptitude Test.
• Are you ready for Hamlet's Duel? Only your knowledge of Shakespeare trivia and quick responses can help Hamlet defeat Laertes (or else he'll be skewered by his opponent).
• Think you really know Shakespeare's memorable quotes? Find out in Name That Play.
• Truly, What's In A Name? Help Juliet find out as she plays a Shakespearean dating game to uncover the identity of three potential suitors

Could YOU have been a success like Shakespeare if you'd lived in the 16th century? This game will let you make the choices- see if you are a winner!

Another quick game to play, especially if you like figuring out words is this fill-in-the -gaps game. You can choose from several plays.

Happy Birthday Shakespeare!

Wednesday 23rd of April is William Shakespeare's 444th birthday. Well, at least we THINK it is. We know that Shakespeare DIED on April 23 1616 because we have a record of his death, but we only assume his his birthday is on the 23 because he was baptised 3 days later on the 26th of April. It is probably no coincidence that St George's day falls on the 23 April as well!

Shakespeare wrote fantastic plays and poems, and is regarded as England's best and most famous playwright. Some of is most famous plays are A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth and Richard III. You may even have heard some of his sonnets at weddings such as Sonnet 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment..) or the very famous Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?).

One thing which Shakespeare did really well was reinvent the English language. He used 29,066 different words in his works in around 100,000 lines of writing- pretty impressive. Did you know tht Shakespeare actually invented a lot of words that we use today? Words like advertising, caked, compromise, elbow, eyeball, lonely, worthless and gossip. If you follow the link you can even see where abouts in his works they appear.
But it's not just words, Shakespeare also invented a lot of phrases we use all the time in our everyday speech. If you've talked about finding out the naked truth, talked about your flesh and blood or turned into a green eyed monster, then you've used a Shakespearean phrase!

Finally, entertain yourself by generating some genuine Shakespearian insults- lots of fun!