Lexicon
Language skills
Deepti

A man called Ammon Shea spent a whole year reading the Oxford English Dictionary and wrote an account of his ‘tireless, word-obsessed and more than slightly masochistic journey’ (the book blurb) titled reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. In his introduction or Exordium, as he prefers to call it, Shea writes, ‘`85enjoy the efforts of a man who is in love with words. I have read the OED so that you don’t have to’. In the book, he draws the readers’ attention towards words that are ‘both spectacularly useful and beautifully useless’: words like ‘obdormition’ or ‘the falling asleep of a limb’.

Language proficiency is made up of four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. When a child acquires a language, listening is first mastered, then comes speaking, followed by reading and then, writing. So, the scientific and effective way of learning English or any other language should be as per the sequence LSRW. When you want to learn English, make sure you first listen to enough well-spoken English. Keep in mind the difference between hearing as the purely physical process of sensing sound waves and listening that means perfect understanding of what is heard. Once you absorb all you listen, then you are ready to speak, and so the process continues till you can write as well as you can listen, speak or read.

When an invitation is involved, the prepositions can confuse. On inviting a person to an event, you are inviting your guest ‘to’ a wedding or reception. But, when you ask someone to eat or drink with you, then you invite the person ‘for’ a meal or a drink. It is an invitation ‘to’ an event but an invitation ‘for’ a meal.

Credited with giving the maximum number of words, Shakespeare also created some idiomatic expressions that became a part of the lingo, such as cold comfort, fancy free, be cruel only to be kind, a tower of strength, love is blind, to be or not to be, pound of flesh and it’s Greek to me.