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RE: Nursery Rhymes and their dark origins!
That was cute. I was not familiar with these particular rhymes. Though I always enjoy learning the historical origin of the proverbs and idiomatic expressions like "It rains cats and dogs" or "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater"
That poor baby .............you probably know that the poorer families in Britain long ago only bathed once a year in May when it was warmer. The father of the household bathed in the clean water first and then the rest of the family in order of seniority. The little baby had no standing and was bathed last. The water by that time was so filthy that it was feared that if it sank it might very well not be seen and consequently 'thrown out with the bathwater' !! How things have changed, thank goodness,
Thanks for your interest.
Yeah. Thanks! I know of this one. There is a number of interesting proverbs in English. My favorite is "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink." I also like the "high horse" analogy.
When you are thinking and writing the idioms of a language you are on the way to mastering it. Well done.
Thank you! What other languages do you know? Dutch? What else?
He @justjoy!
Here is the question I wanted to ask you... Below you can see a snippet of text. Please take a look at the highlighted sentence. As you can see I started it from "yet." At the same time, I've never seen that you've started a sentence in this way in your writing. How do you go about it in a similar context?
Thank you!
The word YET can add an extra thought to your sentence. It can be used more or less the same way that BUT is.
For example......... I normally only play tennis as a sport and yet I'm attracted to golf and plan to try it soon.
Vera's 'yet' doesn't really work, although I understand what you are trying to say.
May I comment of the use of athletic in line 3,
The man has an athletic build OR he is athletically built. It is a tiny point but your English is of such a high standard that you are down to perfecting the details.
Well done.
My other languages are Afrikaans (fairly competent) yes it is an offshoot from Dutch, and Zulu which I enjoy speaking to our local people in Kwa Zulu Natal. They encourage me and make me brave though I know I am not fluent.
Keep on writing, you are doing so well.
Thank you!
I know that I am not using 'Yet' in the correct context. I simply don't know how else I can express the thought in a truly English way. ))) In other words, when the subsequent sentence has a meaning of a slight opposition to the preceding one.
There's got to be an entirely different way to put together the sentence.
Maybe like this.
Come to think of it in the sentence in question I can entirely remove 'yet'.
he has an athletic built or is athletically built
I sense the difference but cannot pick out which construct is more correct. To me, these constructs are semantically interchangeable, and their usage depends on the word order of the surrounding phrase. But I might be wrong. )