Postcard from Bishkek

We all make mistakes … and I admit to several in my postcards. When some eagle eyed person spots a mistake and writes to tell me, I don’t edit the postcard, but add the fact in the comments section below.  Usually the mistake is just a typographical error, I have hit the wrong key and my […]

Language is a funny thing.  We often use words and think that we know what we are saying, but others seem to hear something different. This is especially true when working in a different language where custom and practice, idioms, play such an important role.  I am often asked questions like, “What does … mean?”, […]

I would like to thank everyone who took the trouble to write giving me feedback about the postcards. As I have said to some of them, without their feedback I never know what people make of them. Last week, for example, there were several messages about movies. Someone said that none of the stories that […]

Yesterday, I wrote a postcard about the television programme called “Call my Bluff” and the word “googol”.   Strictly speaking, it wasn’t about Kyrgyzstan, or the life of an ex-pat here in Kyrgyzstan – but I hope I will be forgiven for that. Today’s postcard is also not strictly about Kyrgyzstan but another word taken […]

Back in the days of Black and White television, (yes, that long ago), there was a popular programme on the BBC2 channel called “Call my Bluff!”.   It first appeared in 1965, (in black and white) and lasted until 1988, when it was seen in colour. Call My Bluff was a panel game chaired by […]

Many years ago there was a sitcom on British television called “Mind You Language”.  It was set in a night school English as a Second Language class for foreign students.  It ran for three seasons between 1977 and 1979, and was revived in 1986. The class consisted of a variety of foreigners with varying degrees […]

I have always been attracted by linguistic quirks, conundrums and puns, such as: What’s the longest word in the English language? James Joyce’s spelling for the word “fish” as “ghoti” … What word rhymes with “orange”? Which European capital sounds like multiplying? What is the longest word in English which doesn’t contain a vowel? What […]

It is one of the curious features of Bishkek’s cultural life that there are lots of things are going on – but it’s almost impossible to know about them before it’s too late.  “Mouth-to-mouth” propaganda seems to be the most widely used channel of announcing events and often it’s only sometime after an event has […]

The other day I was talking to an English speaking Russian and she wanted to impress me with how well she spoke English and started telling me jokes in English.  Now humour and poetry are two of the hardest things to translate.  Poetry, because you have to worry about so many different things:, rhyme and […]

The English tend to be very lazy when it comes to learning foreign languages. This could be a result of being an insular island nation — but is probably more a feature of the fact that English is more or less accepted everywhere accepted as the modern “lingua franca” — the universal language of business, entertainment, the internet, and so on. Why should we waste our time learning other languages when everyone speaks English?