A to Z English Words Origins
Henry Hitchings, an etymologist and author of The Secret Life of Words (which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Book Prize this week), presents an A-to-Z of his favourite words that have been absorbed into English from other languages. Funny, awesome as well as surprising origins of some common English words we hear everyday.
Check out all the words below:
Historical Timeline from 1949 to 1989:
Billy Joel
William Martin Joel, famously known as Billy Joel, is an American rock musician, songwriter and singer. He released his first hit single, Piano Man, in 1973. Recording Industry Association America labels Joel as The Sixth Best-Selling Recording Artist in the United States.
One of Billy Joel’s song in STORM FRONT album, We Didn’t Start The Fire, has been considered an essential education tool in terms of history. Each word in the song represents a clickable-historical event in the world. Check out the lyric below and hover your mouse on each word to see the hidden history behind it :
Animal-Assisted Therapies For Children With Special Needs:
Dolphins, the friendly mammals
According to wikipedia, animal-assisted therapy is a kind of therapy that involves an animal with special characteristics and it serves as a fundamental part of a person’s treatment. Animal-assisted therapies are designed to improve the physical, emotion, social and/or cognitive functioning of the patient. These therapies also provide educational and motivational effectiveness for the participants.
Many kinds of animals are used in therapies including dogs, cats, elephants, horses and dolphins as well as other small animals. Among them, the most popular methods are those assisted by Dolphins and horses. These forms of therapies, in the context of children with special needs, offer improvements in such areas as physical (Fine motor skills and balance) and also mental (improving self-confidence, verbal skills and attention skills); nevertheless, both may present some physical threats to both people and animals, which may be difficult to overcome. This post; however, will only concentrate on the dolphin therapy.
Motorcycle Madness:
I swear I was gonna photograph the house, using my bike as a foreground, but I ended up taking pictures of my bike with the house as the background. Here are the pictures, at least you can still see the house, it’s big, cozy and nice.
Baraka Badr Al-Din
Baraka, our second son, was born on February 9th 2008. We thanked Allah SWT that he was born healthy and handsome. We didn’t actually plan to have another baby in regards to the fact that our first son, Muhammad Ariq Azzarel was born with cerebral palsy due to lack of oxygen. We fully blamed ourselves for being ignorant during pregnancy, well, not totally ignorant actually. Both of us really paid attention in terms of nutrition, vitamins, medicines and so on. We really followed what the Gynecologist told us. Later on we learned that we’re not supposed to ‘swallow’ any pieces of advice. We should’ve asked for others’ opinions and all those sort of things. More stories about Ariq can be found here.
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