lexicon
THE WORLD IS MY OYSTER
Deepti 

Play a while

George Bernard Shaw in his usual idiosyncratic style was very impatient with the rule-free style of English spelling. According to him, the word ‘fish’ should be written as ‘ghoti’ to fall in with the phonetic system because gh = f as in rough, o = I as in women and ti = sh as in nation. He wanted to discard useless grammar and spell phonetically. He even suggested a new alphabet and a way of spelling so that one could say ‘I thinked’ instead of ‘I thought’ and spell ‘tough’ as ‘tuf’. His play Androcles and the Lion’ was published with the standard script and his new script on facing pages!

Learn a little

On introducing oneself, there is sometimes a request to talk about your interests. This little segment should, then, be carefully worded, so there is no harm in planning a few words in advance according to the occasion. If, for instance, you are at a seminar on a specialist zone talk about your connection to the zone and your contribution to it; if you are at a club meeting, present those interests that can contribute something to the overall plan of the group and if you are a fresher to a course, describe the interests that will be of significance in your interaction with your teachers and classmates.

When the word ‘doubt’ is used to mean ‘to think something unlikely’, it is used as ‘he doubts if he could have made it’ or ‘he doubts whether he could have made it’. Sometimes, the word is also used negatively but in order to express the opposite, as in ‘there is no reason to doubt that he can make it’. Or, ‘that’ may be left out as in sentences like ‘nobody doubts his ability to make it’.

‘Mini’ comes from ‘miniature’, the word that refers to any representation on a smaller-than-usual scale. Originally, it hails from the Latin ‘red, vermilion’ the colour of the ink used in the 16th century to make bold certain words. This gave birth to the Italian miniature to refer to the small paintings in manuscript illustration; going on to become a verb that meant ‘to reduce in size’ or what we know today as ‘miniaturise’.