Daily English

艾草清凉

What''''s in a name

Vanessa: Hello! I''''m Vanessa. My English teacher gave me this name because it sounds like my Chinese name. I only know that it means "butterfly" in Egyptian. Can you please tell me more about my name? Thanks.

Dear Vanessa: Your name was invented by the famous Irish writer Jonathan Swift, the author of "Gulliver''''s Travels." He wrote a love poem called "Cadenus and Vanessa" in 1713. His girlfriend''''s name was Esther Vanhomrigh. He used the first letters ("es" and "van") of her name to make the new name Vanessa. Later scientists adopted the word "Vanessa" for the name of a genus of butterflies.

[此贴子已经被作者于2004-4-9 14:55:44编辑过]

liverbj

Welcome to English world!

艾草清凉

2004.4.13

The Liberty Bell's Past[“自由钟”的历史]

The Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a powerful symbol of freedom for Americans. This is the bell that rang to announce the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence on July 8, 1776. Later, in the 1830s, abolitionists adopted the cracked bell as the symbol of the fight against slavery.

The original 2,080-pound bronze bell was forged at the Whitechapel Foundry in England in 1752. Its original purpose was to announce important public events and summon Pennsylvanian legislators to the State House.

But the Whitechapel bell cracked the first time it was rung, a fact that a few cheeky Americans never forgot: In 1976, a small group gathered outside the Whitechapel factory, holding signs that read, "We Got A Lemon!" and "What About The Warranty?"

Less argumentative than their descendants, Colonial legislators decided not to return the bell, and instead hired a pair of local metalworkers, John Pass and John Stow, to recast it. The duo, more familiar with pots and pans than bells, decided the original was too brittle and added extra copper to the new bell. Unfortunately, it sounded terrible.

So Pass and Stow tried again, but not everybody liked this new bell either. In 1772, a group of Philadelphia residents living near the State House complained because the bell rang too frequently.

No one is sure when the Liberty Bell started to crack. "There really isn't a lot of hard detail," says Karie Diethorn, chief curator of Independence National Historical Park. In any case, historians are almost certain that the bell was cracked by 1846.

On Feb. 26 of that year, a Philadelphia newspaper reported the bell had "received a sort of compound fracture in a zigzag direction through one of its sides" and now "hangs in the great city steeple irreparably and forever dumb."

To prevent the crack from spreading, repairmen widened it and installed two metal rivets. A more subtle fracture now snakes from the rivets to the crown of the bell.

The Liberty Bell is now a major tourist attraction. It hangs in Philadelphia to this day, flawed and silent, but still a potent symbol of America's fight for freedom.

艾草清凉

2004.4.14

Students Offered Elvish Language Lessons[“精灵语”开课了]

It's central England, not Middle Earth, but one school is offering its pupils the chance to learn Elvish.

Pupils at a British school have signed up to learn a new language in their spare time 一 nothing extraordinary maybe 一 but this time it is an Elvish language devised by "The Lord of the Rings" author JRR Tolkien.

Students at the school are being offered extra lessons in Sindarin 一 a form of Elvish based on Welsh sounds and invented by Tolkien, a former professor of ancient languages at Oxford University.

"The recent success of the Lord of the Rings films has increased the interest in learning Elvish," said coordinator Zainab Thorp at Turves Green Boys' Technology College in Birmingham, England. "The reason I'm offering the lessons is to give the boys, some of whom have special educational needs, something to boost their self-esteem," Thorp said.

Tolkien was an expert in ancient languages who developed two forms of Elvish: the more common Sindarin; and Quenya, which is related to Finnish and was largely a ceremonial language. Jonathan Tolkien, who signed his books JRR Tolkien, wrote "The Lord of the Rings," one of the most popular books in Britain and a mainstay on bookshelves worldwide, in 1954-55.

一塌糊涂

后面的怎么没有了呀？！

lion

以下是引用一塌糊涂在2004-5-8 22:05:55的发言：
后面的怎么没有了呀？！

jiu shi jiu shi ,hai suan shen me mei ri ying yu ?[em21][em21][em21][em21]

艾草清凉

：（一忙加上一懒，自己就耽搁下来了。
学英语真是需要毅力。

一塌糊涂

那我们来监督你吧
哈哈