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Pub Talk and the King's English
课后练习题
I. Write
short notes on: Carlyle, and Lamb.
Suggested Reference
Books[SRB]
1.
The Oxford Companion to English Literature
2. Any standard
book on the history of English literature
3.
Encyclopaedia Britannica
III. Questions on appreciation:
1. In what way
is
“
pub
talk
”
connected with
“
the
King
’
s
English
”
? Is the title of
the piece
well-chosen?
2. Point out the literary
and historical allusions used in this piece and
comment on their use.
3. What is the function of para 5? Is
the change from
abrupt?
4. Do the simple idiomatic
expressions like
etc.,
5. Does the writer reveal
his political inclination in this piece of
writing? How?
IV.
Paraphrase:
1.
And it is an activity
only of humans. (para 1)
2.
Conversation
is not for making a point. (para 2)
3. In fact, the
best conversationalists are those who are prepared
to lose. (para 2)
4. Bar friends are not deeply involved
in each other's lives. (para 3)
5. it could still go
ignorantly on (para 6)
6.
There are cattle in the
fields, but we sit down to beef (boeuf). (para
9)
7.
The
new
ruling
class
had
built
a
cultural
barrier
against
him
by
building
their
French
against his own language.
(para11)
8. English had come royally into its
own. (para 13)
9.
The phrase has always
been used a little pejoratively and even
facetiously by the
lower
classes. (para 15)
10. The
rebellion against a cultural dominance is still
there. (para 15)
11. There is always a great danger that
12. Even with
the most educated and the most literate, the
King's English slips and slides in
conversation. (para 18)
V. Translate paras 9--11 into Chinese.
VI. Look up the dictionary
and explain the meaning of the italicized
idiomatic phrases:
1. their marriage may be on the rocks
(para 3)
2.
they got out of bed on the wrong side (para 3)
3. the
conversation was on wings (para 8)
4. the Norman lords of
course turned up their noses at it (para 10)
5. we ought to
think ourselves back into the shoes of the Saxon
peasant (para 11)
6. English had come royally into its
own. (para 13)
7. we sit up at the vividness of the
phrase (para 18)
VII. Discriminate the
following groups of synonyms:
1. ignorant, illiterate,
uneducated, unlearned
2. jeer, scoff, sneer, gibe, flout
VIII.
Give
ten
synonymous
and/or
related
words
of
the
word
conversation
(meaning
'communication'). Give words of the
same part of speech.
[SRB]
1. Roget ' s International Thesaurus
2. Webster's
Collegiate Thesaurus
IX.
Give ten antonymous and/or contrasted words of the
word intricate. Give words of the same
part of speech.
[SRB]
1. Roget's International Thesaurus
2. Webster's
Collegiate Thesaurus
X.
Look up the dictionary, find out from what
languages the following words are borrowed, and
then put them into Chinese:
1. buffet 8.
soireé
15. attaehé
2. cuisine 9.
cloisonné
16. liaison
3. lemonade 10. omelette
17. dé
jà
vu
4. liqueur 11. restaurateur
18. encore
5.
dé
jeuner 12. repertoire 19.
discothè
que
6. menu 13. coup d'é
tat 20.
chandelier
7.
salon 14. corps de ballet
XI.
The
following
sentences
all
contain
metaphors
or
similes.
Explain
their
meaning
in
plain,
non-figurative language:
one has any idea where it
will go as it meanders or leaps and sparkles or
just glows.
got out of bed on the wrong side is simply not a
concern.
are
like
the
musketeers
of Dumas
who,
although
they
lived
side
by
side
with
each
other, did not delve
into each other's lives or the recesses of their
thoughts and feelings.
ly the alchemy of conversation took
place
glow of
the conversation burst into flames.
ought to think ourselves
back into the shoes of the Saxon peasant.
Elizabethans
blew on it as on a dandelion clock, and its seeds
multiplied, and floated to
the ends of
the earth.
8.I
have an unending love affair with dictionaries
9. Otherwise
one will bind the conversation, one will not let
it flow freely here and there.
10. We would never have
gone to Australia, or leaped back in time to the
Norman Conquest.
XII. Study the model
given below. Then read the next two paragraphs and
show how coherence
and unity is
improved by the use, of transitional devices.
Model: But this
is only one aspect of the problem. Another, no
less essential, is the wider gap
between generations since the rate of
social development has speeded up. The tastes and
habits of
young people today differ
markedly from those of the young people of the
thirties, let alone of the
twenties.
Still influenced by the tastes and habits of their
own youth, the
think
these
habits
and
tastes
are
absolutes
and
to
deny
their
children
the
right
to
independent
creativity which
they demanded from their own parents. Hence the
artificial conflicts, in which a
dance
or
the
width
of
trousers
is
elevated
to
the
dignity
of
crucial
issues.
The
writer
uses
the
following transitional
devices:
1)
Transitional words and expressions
but another still hence
2) Pronoun
reference
those
their these they
3) Repetition of important words
tastes and
habits young people
1. And since we (teenagers) are so new,
many people have some very wrong ideas about us.
For
instance,
the
newspapers
are
always
carrying
advice-columns
telling
our
mothers
how
to
handle
us,
their
maladjusted
offspring,
and
the
movies
portray
us
as
half-witted
bops (hoodlums-
ed. ); and in the current best sellers, authors
recall their own confused, unhappy
youth. On the other hand, speakers tell
us that these teen-years are the happiest and
freest of our
lives, or hand us the
teen-agers are either car-stealing,
dope-taking delinquents, or immature, weepy
adolescents with
nothing on our minds
but boys (or girls as the case may be ). Most
adults have one or two attitudes
toward
the handling of teens--some say that only a sound
beating will keep us in line; others treat
us as mentally unbalanced creatures on
the brink of insanity, who must be pampered and
shielded
at any cost.
2.
As
of
today,
I
am
fed
up
with
the
food
served
in
the
campus
dining
hall.
My
disenchantment started in September---
the day I bit into a hamburger to find myself
staring at a
long strand of grey hair
that trailed out of the meat, through the
mayonnaise, and over the edge of
the
bun. After
that,
I
was
not
much
surprised
by
the
little
things
I
came
across
in
October
and
November: bugs in the salad and bobby
pin in the meatloaf, for example. Then in December
the
food was worse--and a little
dirtier. For Christmas dinner, for in- stance, the
cook gave me a thin
slice of rolled
turkey, straight out of the can, and dished up a
cock-roach in my pudding. Even that
was
excusable (nobody is perfect), but what happened
today is not
my clam chowder before I
found it, at the bottom of the bowl, nestled among
the diced potatoes
and the chopped
onions: one band-aid, slightly used.
XIII. Topics for oral work:
1. In your opinion, what
makes or spoils a good conversation?
2. Is spoken English
different from written English? In what ways are
they different?
XIV. Write
a short composition describing some of the
peculiarities of spoken English
Pub
Talk and the King's English
课后练习题答案
Ⅰ
.
1. Carlyle : Thomas Carlyle
(1795-1881), English essayist and historian born
at Ecclefechan,
a village of the Scotch
lowlands. After graduating from the University of
Edinburgh, he rejected
the ministry,
for which he had been intended, and determined to
he a writer of hooks. In 1826 he
married Jane Welsh, a well-informed and
ambitious woman who did much to further his
career.
They moved to Jane' s farm at
Craigenputtoeh where they lived for 6 years
(1828-1834 ). During
this time he
produced Sartor Resartus (1833-1834), a book in
which he first developed his char-
acteristic style and thought. This book
is a veiled sardonic attack upon the shams and
pretences of
society,
upon
hollow
rank, hollow
officialism,
hollow
custom,
out
of
which
life
and
usefulness
have departed. In
1837 he published The French Revolution, a poetic
rendering and not a factual
account of
the great event in history. Besides these two
masterpieces, he wrote Chartism (1840),
On Heroes, hero Worship, and the Heroic
in History (I841), Past and Present (1843) and
others.
a
peculiar
style
of
his
own,
was
a
compound
of
biblical
phrases,
col
loquialisms,
Teutonic
twists,
and
his
own
coinings,
arranged
in
unexpected
sequences.
One
of
the
most
important social critics of his day,
Carlyle influenced many men of the younger
generation, among
them were Mathew
Arnold and Ruskin.
2. Lamb : Charles Lamb (1775-1834),
English essayist, was born in London and brought
up
within the precincts of the ancient
law courts, his father being a servant to an
advocate of the inner
Temple.
He
went
to
school
at
Christ's
Hospital,
where
he
had
for
a
classmate
Coleridge,
his
life-long friend. At seventeen, he
became a clerk in the India House and here he
worked for 33
years until he was re-
tired on a pension. His devotion to his sister
Mary, upon whom rested an
hereditary
taint of insanity, has done al-most as much as the
sweetness and gentle humor of his
writings to endear his name. They
collaborated on several books for children,
publishing in 1867
their famous Tales
from Shakespeare. His dramatic essays, Specimens
of English Dramatic Poets
(1808),
established his reputation as a critic and did
much in reviving the popularity of Eliza-be
then
drama.
The
Essays
of
Ella,
published
at
intervals
in
London
Magazine,
were
gathered
together
and
republished
in
two
series,
the
first
in
1823,
the
second
ten
years
later.
They
established Lamb in the title which he
still holds, that of the most delightful of
English essayists.
Ⅱ
.
1.A good conversation does not really
start from anywhere, and no one has any idea where
it
will go. A good conversation is not
for making a point. Argument may often be a part
of it, but the
purpose of the argument
is not to convince. When people become serious and
talk as if they have
something
very
important
to
say,
when
they
argue
to
convince
or
to
win
their
point,
the
conversation is spoilt.
2. The writer likes bar
conversation very much because he has spent a lot
of time in pubs and
is used to this
kind of conversation. Bar friends are companions,
not intimates. They are friends
but not
intimate enough to be curious about each other's
private life and thoughts.
3. No. Conversation does not need a
focus. But when a focal subject appears in the
natural
flow of conversation, the
conversation becomes vivid, lively and more
interesting.