In this episode: Vocabulary words with silent letters that might not be silent anymore, tag questions, a lesson about insisting, the Joke of the Week, a listening quiz, and more.
Episode 146 of the Everybody ESL podcast has a list of vocabulary words with changing pronunciations, a lesson about insisting, tag questions, the Joke of the Week, a listening quiz, and more. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions (or if you’d like to record an introduction for future episodes), send an email to EverybodyESL@gmail.com!
Episode 146 rundown: Vocabulary (silent letters that might not be silent anymore): 1:20, Small talk (how to insist): 7:40, Grammar (Part 1 in a series about tag questions): 10:15, The Joke of the Week: 14:30, Listening quiz: 16:20.
Vocabulary: silent letters that aren't silent anymore?
For today’s vocabulary section, I want to do something a little bit different. Instead of teaching you a bunch of good words that you probably don't already know, I want to talk about some common words that you probably do already know. And the reason I want to talk about them is because I think something interesting is happening with the way English speakers pronounce these words.
If you have any experience with English at all—and I know you do—you already know that English spelling is very strange. It's very hard to learn. It does not seem to follow a lot of rules. It really does not make a lot of sense. One way that English spelling does not make very much sense is that many words are written with what we call “silent letters.” They are written with letters that are never pronounced. You need to write them, but we don’t say them. For instance, the word knife. Knife. K-n-i-f-e. K? N-i-f... e? Well, we don't pronounce the k. We don't really pronounce the e. So there are silent letters in that word. And that is extremely common. There are many, many, many words that are written with silent letters. In some cases, I have noticed some words that are written with silent letters where the pronunciation has been changing recently. I hear these new pronunciations more and more often. And I wanted to share this with you.
I know that you have seen words that are written with a silent L. There are some very, very common words that have silent Ls in them, like the word talk. T-a-l-k. We don't pronounce that L. We don't say “tal-k.” We say “tok.” And the same with walk. W-a-l-k. We don't say “wal-k.” We say “wok.” That L is silent. We write it, but we don't say it.
However, here are some words with silent Ls, where people have started to pronounce those Ls. They have started to say them. For instance, the word calm. C-a-l-m. Calm, meaning quiet or restful. I have started hearing people say “cal-m. Cal-m.” They are pronouncing that L.
How about this one? Palm. The front part of your hand. You know, the palm of your hand. The palm of your hand. P-a-l-m. Or also a palm tree. Same thing. I have started hearing people pronounce that “pal-m. Pal-m.” With an L sound in there.
Now here is a word that you might not know. The word is folks. Folks. F-o-l-k-s. Folks is a casual, informal way of saying “people.” Lately, I have started hearing more and more people pronounce that word as “fol-ks. Fol-ks.” They are pronouncing that L. That L used to only be silent in folks. You never pronounced it. Now I’m starting to hear people pronounce it in this new way: “fol-ks.”
I have two more examples. And I think these are both interesting ones. The first is the name of a certain kind of nut: an almond. Almond. A-l-m-o-n-d. I realized that sometimes people do say, “all-mond. All-mond.” They pronounce the L. Now, I did a little bit of quick research on this, and I learned that until 20 or 30 years ago, most English dictionaries did not list that pronunciation for almond. They did not list the pronunciation with the L. They only had the pronunciation like “ah-mond,” with no L sound. And now dictionaries are including the version with the L sound. So if you look up the word almond in a dictionary, you will probably find two pronunciations. You will find “ah-mond”—with no L sound—and “all-mond”—with an L sound.
And my last example is the name of a very famous character in books and TV shows and movies. This is maybe the world's most famous detective. And his first name is Sherlock. Do you know his last name? Do you know Sherlock's last name? Well, if you do, let me ask you this: How do you pronounce it? Do you pronounce it with an L sound, or no L sound? Well, his name is Sherlock Holmes. H-o-l-m-e-s. That L is usually silent. Or maybe it used to be usually silent. When I think about it, I realize that some people do pronounce his name “Holms. Sherlock Holms,” with an L sound. Sometimes it's silent. Sometimes it isn't.
Well, that is this episode’s vocabulary section. If you listen, I think you will hear people say some of these words with an L. The L is no longer silent, or no longer always silent in words like calm, palm, folks, almond, and Sherlock Holmes.
Small Talk: how to politely insist
For this episode’s small talk topic—or social situation—I want to tell you how to insist something. Do you know what it means to insist something? If you insist, you are giving a kind of strong command. You are making it clear that you believe something very strongly. And sometimes, we need to insist on certain things.
For example, let's say you have a friend come over to your apartment for dinner. And after dinner, you serve your friend some cookies that you baked earlier in the day. And your friend loves these cookies. And you feel happy to see your friend enjoying this dessert. And then, when your friend is getting ready to leave at the end of the night, you say, “I would like you to take the rest of the cookies home. You enjoyed them so much, I would like you to have them.”
Your friend would probably say something like, “No, no, that's okay. They were delicious, but no, I couldn't take them. You keep them. Thank you.”
Now, what if you really want your friend to take these cookies? What do you say? How do you tell your friend that you're serious? You really mean it: you want your friend to take the cookies when they go home. Well, all you really need to do is use that word insist—which is i-n-s-i-s-t. Insist. You just need to say, “No, really, I insist.”
Don't worry that the word insist sounds a little too strong. If you say this in a friendly way, it will be perfectly polite. It will not sound like you are giving your friend an order. It will sound like you are expressing yourself very firmly but in a polite, friendly way.
You could say, “No, really, I insist. I really want you to take the cookies with you.” It might sound like it's a little strong, but it's not. It sounds firm and forceful, but it still sounds friendly. And that is how you insist on something.
Grammar: Part One of the tag question series
We have talked about different kinds of questions before on the podcast. But I realized there's one kind of question we have not talked about. And that is going to be the topic for a new series of grammar lessons. The kind of question I'm thinking of is tag questions. Tag questions. Have you heard of tag questions before? Well, you're about to if you haven't before, because this is Part One in a new series all about tag questions.
The first thing to know is... What am I talking about? What is a tag question? Let me give you a few examples of tag questions.
“You’ve gone to a wedding before... haven’t you? You’ve gone to a wedding before... haven’t you?
Here's another one: “She is still studying for her math test... isn't she? She is still studying for her math test... isn't she?”
And here's one more: “We aren't late for the movie... are we? We aren't late for the movie... are we?”
In each of these examples, you can hear that there is something added to the end of the sentence, or something tagged on to the end. That's why they're called “tag questions.” Because tag can mean “to add something to.” So in all of these questions, we start with a regular declarative—that is, a non-question statement—and then we repeat part of that statement and add it on to the end. That's the first thing I want you to know about tag questions: what they look like.
The second thing I want you to know about tag questions is what they sound like. Listen again when I say these tag questions. And listen for what my voice does. Listen to what the pitch of my voice does. “You’ve gone to a wedding before... haven't you?” “She is still studying for her math test... isn't she?” “We aren’t late for the movie... are we?” You can hear in each of those example tag questions that my voice goes very high at the very end. The pitch of my voice goes way up. “We aren’t late for the movie... are we?” Boy, it went up a lot right there. So that is what tag questions sound like.
And the last thing I want to tell you about tag questions for Part One in this series is what tag questions mean. Why do we form tag questions? What do we do with them? Tag questions are another way of saying something like, “Right?” Or “Isn't that true?” Or “Don't you agree?” I think when we use tag questions we are looking for confirmation. We are hoping that somebody will agree with us. We think that we're right, and we want the other person to agree with us.
So, going back to my examples, we could say, “You've gone to a wedding before, haven’t you?” That's like saying, “You've gone to a wedding before. Isn't that true? I'm right—don't you agree? Tell me that I'm right.”
“She is still studying for her math test, isn't she?” That's another way of saying, “I think that she is still studying for her math test” or “I'm right. She is still studying for her math test” or “I want you to agree with me when I say that she is still studying for her math test.”
And the last example again was “We aren't late for the movie, are we?” And that's another way of saying something like, “Please tell me that we are not late for the movie. I hope we're not late for the movie. Is that correct?”
In a future episode, we will have Part Two in this series about tag questions. We’ll talk about how to form them. How do you make a tag question? Well, we'll find out.
The Joke of the Week!
And now it's time for The Joke of the Week! That's right: it's The Joke of the Week, a joke that will probably not be very funny, but I still like sharing these jokes with you because I think they can tell us interesting or unusual things about English.
Here is this week’s joke. Why did the students eat their homework? Why did the students eat their homework? Well, I'm just going to tell you. Why did the students eat their homework? Because their teacher said it would be a piece of cake. Because their teacher said it would be a piece of cake!
Do you understand this? Do you understand why this is a joke, or why it's supposed to be funny? Well, it's because “piece of cake” means two very different things. The first meaning—the literal meaning—is a piece of a cake. A piece of a kind of dessert called a cake. And that is obviously something you can eat. But the other meaning of “piece of cake” is something that is very easy to do. If something is very easy to do, you can say that it is a piece of cake. It’s a strange expression. I'm not sure where it came from. But it's that expression that makes this a hilarious joke that you will remember and laugh at for the rest of your life. And that's this week's Joke of the Week.
Listening Quiz
Here are this episode's listening quiz sentences: