Amount of people??

 You mean...like this?

Another mistake that I hear native speakers of English make on the radio and TV is this: amount of people. 

"Amount" is a word that is used with things you can't count, such as 'rice'. You don't go into a Chinese restaurant and say, "I'd like the sweet and sour pork with 1,299 rices." Rice has no plural. Neither does furniture or money. Or a wealth of other uncountable nouns such as sand, knowledge, information, accommodation (whatever the Americans say), motivation and courage. (If you want more information on uncountable nouns, go here: https://ieltsliz.com/uncountable-nouns-word-list/).

If you can't count it, can't make a noun plural out of it, then you use all the words that go with uncountable nouns such as much, less and amount.

People, on the other hand, are countable. One person, two people. You'd ask, "How many people came to your birthday party?" and not, "How much people came?" If you can get that right, then how can you possibly use 'amount' and not 'number' when talking about people?

A large number of people ate a large amount of rice.
How many people ate how much rice?

Every time I hear the phrase "a large amount of people", I see a whole mountain of people all piled higgledy-piggledy on each other - just like a mound of rice in a bowl.

That's an "amount of people". Get it right, for heaven's sake. If you can't get simple English grammar right, what else can't you get right? Facts?

Jessica Fletcher - fashion icon?

As I may have already mentioned, I've been watching an awful lot of TV in my attempt to finish cross-stitching a tablecloth* as a gift for a former student of mine who makes wonderful things for me. And my TV viewing has included an awful lot of back-to-back episodes of Murder She Wrote, starring the delightful Angela Lansbury as former high-school English teacher-turned-crime writer Jessica Fletcher, or JB Fletcher as she often calls herself.

The series ran from 1984, when Ms Lansbury was just under 60 years of age, until 1996. The more I watch it, the more I admire it. With all such crime series in which each episode stands alone, I am in awe of the writers who can create such perfect little stories that last a mere forty-five minutes, as well as the casting agents who hire the actors with the perfect faces to fit each role. 

With Murder She Wrote, though, there is another set of workers that I admire: the people who dress the character of Jessica Fletcher. In each episode, she appears in several outfits, nearly all of which are very well put together. Her clothes and accessories set off her face and figure to their best advantage. Classic combinations. Beautifully tailored. Wonderfully accented. I am in often awe and want to rush out and try out such outfits myself. 

This website will give you a small idea of what I mean. I don't think that this person has picked out the best of her outfits all the time, but some of them will exemplify my claim that Jessica Fletcher is most definitely a fashion icon:

https://fashionshewore.tumblr.com/

* The tablecloth was finally completed at 6.10 p.m. on 14 April. I finally get my life back. Nearly everything else bar working and sleeping was on hold.

Living vicariously

 That's what I've been doing a lot of recently: vicarious living.

I remember coming across that word in the English lessons of Miss Olive Jewitt when I was in my mid-teens. At first, I thought it had something to do with vicars. How wrong I was.

Last week, until things got busy on Friday, I had finished my work by mid-morning, which meant I could devote all my free hours to working on the cross-stitch tablecloth for a friend of mine. A never-ending saga. 

In order to entertain myself, I watched an awful lot of TV again, including some on a channel that is new to me: Smithsonian Channel. Back-to-back documentaries such as Aerial America (1 hour of aerial shots of one state with lots of background details), Aerial Greece (shots of Greece from the air with lots of explanations), three back-to-back documentaries on sharks...you get the picture. Later on in the afternoon, I switch to 5USA and it's one episode after another of Law & Order followed by about 3 hours of NCIS. And on Saturday, as of 2 p.m., it's non-stop Murder She Wrote; Sunday afternoon is time for Columbo.

I am currently living life through these programmes. I get to see the outside world from the air and in the sea. I see parties, travel on planes, go to restaurants, go to conferences etc. through the eyes of Jessica Fletcher and Lieutenant Columbo, Lennie Briscoe and Jack McCoy, as well as Jethro Gibbs, Ziva David and Tim McGee. Just to mention a few of the names whose voices and faces I am most familiar with these days because that's how small my world has become.

The word "vicarious" is defined as "experienced in the imagination through the feelings and actions of another person". It's what I have always done with books and now, thanks to this bloody tablecloth, it's what I'm doing with all these documentaries and crime shows. My life is currently being lived through them.

I want my old life back! I want to have my own experiences again!!!

April, April, der macht was er will.

At the beginning of last week, although the temperature was supposed to be a mere 8 degrees Celsius above freezing point, I was nevertheless able to sun myself on my balcony as of 8 o'clock in the morning. My balcony is a veritable sun trap in the morning and I need to tank up on vitamin D as I am still way below the minimum threshold.

Then we had the Easter weekend and what usually happens on a public holiday happened on all four days of the extended weekend: the temperatures plummeted and the weather became overcast.

Yesterday, Easter Monday, was a superb example of public holiday weather: we started off with merely overcast skies and progressed throughout the day from light rain to snow to hailstones to bright sunshine with blue skies and back again to snow and hailstones.

I always feel sorry for schoolchildren when the weather turns like this. On a day when they can go out and enjoy the countryside and parks with their parents, they have to remain cooped up at home.

April, April, der macht was er will is a German country saying and translates literally as "April, April, it does what it wants". 

"April, April", however, is also what a German prankster shouts triumphantly when someone has fallen for their April Fool's joke. The English equivalent would simply be "April Fool!"

I feel, therefore, that the weather was playing a very late April Fool's joke on us yesterday by keeping us guessing what would come next. When the sun came out in the afternoon, I'm sure a lot of people though that the worst was over and they went out to enjoy the sunshine. More fool them. 

What's happening to the simple comparative form?

 I have known for a long time that many people in the UK have no idea how to make the comparative form of an adverb. How often have you heard people say that they "eat healthier" these days? Do they say, "I eat healthy"? No, they say, "I eat healthily". So they should be saying "I eat more healthily these days than I used to." It seems to me, though, that most people in the press and on TV or the radio can't manage that. Shame. My students would be marked down for writing and speaking like that in the exam.

Now, to add to the fact that a huge number of native speakers can't manage to form the comparative form of an adverb, they seem to be forgetting that there are two ways to make a comparative form of an adjective.

As you are probably aware, English started off as a Germanic language and then was heavily influenced by Latin and French after the Norman Conquest of 1066 (practically the only date that most British people will know).

Nearly all adjectives longer than one syllable use the French way of making a comparative (and superlative).

interesting - more interesting - the most interesting
difficult - more difficult - the most interesting

All adjectives of one syllable, two-syllable adjectives ending in -y and a handful of other two-syllable adjectives ending in -er, -le and -ow use the German way of forming comparatives and superlatives

hard - harder - the hardest
rare - rarer - the rarest
sunny - sunnier - the sunniest
lucky - luckier - the luckiest
narrow - narrower - the narrowest
simple - simpler - the simplest
clever - cleverer - the cleverest

But what have I been hearing on BBC Radio 4 these last few weeks? "More rare", "more strict", "more dear" and so on and so forth. I mean...WHAT? 

So far, I've not heard 'more hard' and 'more fast' rather than harder and faster, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

In the meantime, my foreign students of English - from Germany, China, Ukraine, Spain, France etc. - they have to speak and write correct English. Oh, the irony.

Move, for heaven's sake!

Over the last few months, I've caught a lot of old episodes of Midsomer Murders on online TV channels. And there is something that really puzzles me: whenever the next murder victim turns round and sees the murderer bearing down on them, they don't move. At all. They just lie, sit or stand there, impassively, open their eyes wide, allow their mouth fall open and let the murderer shoot, stab, push them off a balcony or kill them in some other, more devious way.

And I wonder if people really have no reflexes these days? Don't they have any instincts of self-preservation? Can't they roll out of harm's way? Can't they turn sideways? Take a few steps back? Duck?

Not in Midsomer Murders and a few other TV series, it seems. In a similar vein to what the Victorians advised women who had to put up with their husbands' "urges", they just lie back and take whatever is coming to them. Even when I shout a warning at the screen...

I only wanted one book! On the deadly attraction of bookshops

 There used to be a shop in Düsseldorf called Stern Verlag. It formed part of my imaginary heaven: an outdoor pool in a nice park, the sixth floor of KaDeWe (the large department store in the heart of Berlin, whose sixth floor is devoted to food) and Stern Verlag - the massive bookshop on various levels that you could just get lost in.

Sadly, that bookshop is no more. It overreached itself, expanding into adjacent commercial space and adding a cafe, and it crumbled. The space it used to occupy is still empty. It's a heartbreaking sight. 

I would always have to stay at least 200 metres away from Stern Verlag, because if I got any closer, it would magically draw me to it and I'd be forced to walk through its doors, whereupon I would enter into a trance and wander around there for an hour or two. You could even sit down in places and do some very intensive browsing. It was heaven. 

Naturally, even if I entered determined to buy only one book as a present, I would come out with more than originally planned.

In a similar vein, I toodled off to Mayersche bookshop on Saturday to buy one address book and one French book to read in April. (I've already got a French book to read for March.)

Mayersche is really not my favourite bookshop. For me, it's a massive escalator system in the middle of the shop with a few books huddled around it.

However, I managed to find a very small selection of address books and begrudgingly bought one. 

Then I bought one French book, and another, and finally a third. 

Turning round, I happened to see some interesting popular science titles in English. Oh, my...

In the end, besides the small, green address book, I came away with this haul:

1. La jeune fille et la nuit by Guillaume Musso

2. Completement crame by Gilles Legardinier

3. Deux soeurs by David Foenkinos
and

4. Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is Mostly Wrong by Eric Barker

5. Bulls**t Jobs: the Rise of Pointless Work and what we can do about it by David Graeber

6. Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Bannerjee and Duflo (a Nobel-prize-winning husband and wife team who wrote the fantastic book Poor Economics, a veritable eye-opener and must-read)

7. Natural Born Leaders: Our Incredible Capacity to Learn and How We Can Harness It by Alex Beard.

I've got a lot of reading to do, then. Not sure when I will cram it all in. At least I won't need to go near a bookshop in the near future.