Category: English language

In the UK, surnames are passed down the generations and are the last part of a person’s name, e.g.  ‘Miss Patricia Eleanor Hunter‘. When two people marry, the woman may legally take her husband’s surname, but this is entirely her own choice. Anyone can change their given names by deed poll at any time after the age of 16.

British surnames, since they came into being in the Middle Ages, are a creative product of the need to correctly record and distinguish between individuals in a growing population. That is why there are tens of thousands of British surnames, some of them differing by just one letter from another, e.g. Davis and Davies, though this is also explained by the wayward spelling of poorly educated people and by regional differences.

Many British surnames derive from places (e.g. Marston), geographical features (e.g. Hill) or occupations (e.g. Cooper). Others denote family relationships (e.g. Johnson), nicknames (e.g. Short), or are adaptations through the generations. The BBC gives lots of examples on this webpage.

(Image: pixabay.com)

The Globe Theatre in London was built by Sam Wanamaker as a replica of the theatre in which Shakespeare’s plays were first performed in the early 1600s, with Shakespeare himself acting in them. That original theatre was probably not called the “Globe” and it only stood for around 45 years, minus a year when it was being re-built after accidentally burning to the ground.

The modern-day ‘Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre‘ opened for performances in 1997. It is three storeys high, with twenty sides. The stage protrudes into the audience, is five feet high and has an overhanging balcony above. London’s only thatched roof sits above the seating benches but the centre is open-air. The structure is made entirely of English oak and the stage has minimal lighting and no microphones.  This is all intended to follow the original design, as far as archaeologists and historians can ascertain.

Here is the expert linguist, Professor David Crystal, and his actor son, Ben, talking in the Globe Theatre about the pronunciation of English in Shakespeare’s time…

(Top image: Christine Matthews at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

“Words are mastered by meeting them, not by avoiding them.” This was Geraldine McCaughrean’s advice to publishers who favour children’s books with simpler vocabulary. Yet the English language comprises tens of thousands of words, and it is only through exposing readers to this wealth of expression that interesting paths of thinking develop and realms of knowledge become available.

Geraldine McCaughrean‘s book, ‘Where the World Ends‘, illustrated by Jane Milloy, won the 2018 CILIP Carnegie Medal, an annual British award for excellence in children’s literature. She also won it in 1988 with ‘Pack of Lies’.

CILIP stands for the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. Carnegie refers to the Carnegie UK Trust and its efforts to promote public libraries and children’s interest in reading. The Carnegie awards were established in 1936. CILIP also administers the Kate Greenaway awards for children’s book illustration.

(Image [cropped]: CILIP Photos at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC 2.0)

Emily Jane Brontë (1818-48) was part of a tragic but creative family in Yorkshire which produced what are now regarded as classic English literary works. Her own was called ‘Wuthering Heights‘ (1847), a story of vengeance, death, love and cruelty and it challenged Victorian ideas about class. Without the normal morality lesson, it was panned by critics at the time.

Emily herself died of tuberculosis aged only 30, just a year after the book was first published. The featured image is of Haworth House, the parsonage where she and her family lived and all but the youngest, Anne, died. Although Emily and her siblings loved the moors near their home, the district did not have good sanitation and the water supply was polluted, sadly.

Indeed, in the industrial town of Haworth at that time, life expectancy was a mere 19-25 years, but Emily’s Irish father, Patrick (1777-1861, original surname Brunty), had been given a job for life there so did not consider moving away. He outlived all his family ~ his wife, his son and his five daughters, of whom Emily was the fourth.

(Top image: DS Pugh at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The writer Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad (“V.S.”) Naipaul died in August 2018, just short of his 86th birthday. He was born in Trinidad in 1932 but studied in England at Oxford University as a young man and became a British citizen. He wrote more than thirty books, including ‘A House for Mr Biswas’ (1961) and ‘In a Free State’ (1971) for which he won that year’s Booker Prize.

He wrote both fiction and non-fiction and in various styles, from comic to bleak.

The video below is of a short speech he gave in 2001 during the Nobel Prize awards event, at which he was honoured with the Prize in Literature.

(Top image of Naipaul in 2016: Faizul Latif Chowdhury at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)