Last weekend in the UK saw the second of what was planned to become an annual event. The Boring Conference was established in 2010 to celebrate the mundane; it’s organised around a series of speeches on a variety of subjects which may be fascinating to the speakers, but perhaps less than that to the audience. We’re sure everyone has a friend who is absolutely fascinated by something which is of no interest at all to anyone else -  and then imagine a series of 20 people like that speaking one after the other! Some of the planned speeches were on hairdryers, different locations where a film (about a by) were filmed in London and the history of the square root of two. The organiser  – James Ward organised the conference as a contrast to what he sees as today’s attention-grabbing world of modern media and advertising. He harks back to long summer holidays as a child where you could spend hours in the long summer holidays just being fascinated by nothing special. He thinks as adults we have lost that ability and should try to rediscover it. The big danger for him and his conference of course is that it becomes too interesting!

If you are thinking of doing something a bit more interesting with your time and want to improve your language levels, why not think about coming to study English in London with UIC. We have lots of different courses and are not at all boring. And to help you with your English – here are some expressions linked to this theme you might like to try out. Not that you’ll ever need them in classes with UIC of course!

You can be:

bored out of your mind

Bored to death

Bored to tears

Bored silly

Bored stupid

Bored stiff

Bored rigid

Your eyes can glaze over

your mind wanders

Your brain goes numb

You nod off

Something that is boring can be like watching paint dry or like watching the grass grow.

And when you are bored you can yawn – or even say something is a big yawn.

And just so you can be warned of the dangers, here is a fascnating clip from the 60s about the dangers of boredom at work!

You might be forgiven for thinking English is the only language out there that matters (and perhaps in some circles this is not too far form the truth) but you will no doubt be reassured to know that other, and significantly minority, languages live on. Actually they do more than live on, they are thriving. Saturday saw the final of a singing competition where there was one rule – none of the songs could be sung in English!It is the annual LIET INTERNATIONAL SONG CONTEST. This year the winner was Janna Eijer – a singer from from the village of Jobbegea who sings in Friesan – a language spoken by people in parts of Germany and the Netherlands. The 12 finalists sang in Irish, Croatian, Gaelic, Sápmi, Ladinian, Vepsian (Karelia), Ladinian (South Tyrol), Udmurtian (a Finno-Ugric language in Russia), Friulian, Rumantsch (Switzerland), Basque and Asturian. So, you see there is a life apart from X-factor and the normal radio fare. But there is still plenty of reason to learn English – come and try with us at uiclondon or perhaps even try one of the foreign languages we teach – we have just added Arabic to our classes, so now have regular classes in 8 languages as well as English.

A recent piece of research has come up with a surprising conclusion. The Texas based Global Language Monitor looks at the internet, blogosphere and 75000 media titles and analyses them to find the most commonly used words, phrases and names. The results initially seem surprising, but considering the majorty of online titles are likely to be news or commentary based rather than individuals comments - perhaps not. In 2011 the most commonly appearing names in written Enlgish were:Steve Jobs, Osama Bin-Laden and Fukushima. Also appearing in the top 10 was our very own Kate Middleton – but not Prince William. The top words were ‘occupy’ ‘defecit’ and ‘fracking’ whilst the top phrases were ‘arab spring’, ‘royal wedding’,'anger and rage’ and ‘climate change’. The Global Language Monitor said ‘Our top words, phrases and names come from five continents – confirmation of the ever-expanding influence of the English Language.’ So, when you join us at UIC London to learn English you will have the perfect opportunity to discover how to include these words in your everyday use of English!

In case you don’t know what they mean (and the rest of the top 10) here you are direct from the Global English review:

“1. Occupy – ‘Occupy’ has risen to pre-eminence through Occupy Movement, the occupation of Iraq, and the so-called ‘Occupied Territories’.
2. Deficit – Growing and possibly intractable problem for the economies of the developed world.
3. Fracking – Hydraulic fracturing is a controversial method for extracting fossil fuels from hitherto unreachable deposits.
4. Drone – The ever increasing number of remotely piloted aircraft used for reconnaissance and attack purposes.
5. Non-veg – A meal served with meat, originally from India, now catching on worldwide.
6. Kummerspeck – From the German seeing wider acceptance in the English, excess weight gained from emotional overeating (grief bacon).
7. Haboob – A name imported from the Arabic for massive sandstorms in the American Southwest.
8. 3Q – Near universal term for ‘thank you’ now  earning additional status after being banner from official Chinese dictionaries.  Another example of the ever increasing mixing of numbers and letters to form words.
9. Trustafarians – Well-to-do youth (trust-funders) living a faux-Bohemian life style, now associated with the London Riots.
10. (The Other)  99 – Referring to the majority of those living in Western Democracies who are left out of the dramatic rise in earnings associated with “the Top 1%”.”

and one final thing – what was the most common word and name when this survey started in 2000? Top Word:  Chad, Top Phrase:  Dot.com
Top Name: W (Dubya).

Without doubt you’ve come across Google and use it regularly. But have you found out about Google Labs? In their own words “Google Labs is a playground where our more adventurous users can play around with prototypes of some of our wild and crazy ideas and offer feedback directly to the engineers who developed them. Please note that Labs is the first phase in a lengthy product development process and none of this stuff is guaranteed to make it onto Google.com. While some of our crazy ideas might grow into the next Gmail or iGoogle, others might turn out to be, well, just plain crazy.”

One of the ideas that we were introduced to earlier this week is the ngram. You can see this by following the link to the ngram viewer. Over the last few years Google has been busy digitising the books in the library of congress and plans to digitise all the books available. With a sample of 12 million books a team of researchers used this massive database to plot the usage of different words over time. So, for example you can see how popular a particular word is now compared to 200 years ago. Unsurprisingly enough if you type in ‘computer’ and ‘steam’ as 2 words you can see how they have changed in frequency over the last 200 years. At one level it’s a bit of fun – type in pairs like man, woman or god, devil and you’ll get some information about society’s use of these words. If you type in lots of words in a lexical group – for example words for a man (man, bloke, chap, gentleman, geezer) you can see how some of these are more popular at different times – giving you an insight into social changes. You can filter by British English and American English as well as other languages so you can get all sorts of ideas about the way language has developed. The authors estimate there are around 1million words in English but a further 5 – 10 times as many which are in circulation but not officially recorded. And these come and go – some becomming normal, and others just disappearing. One of the really interesting things you can do is to plot changes in language use – for example to see  how different grammatical uses of words have changed over time – if you look at 2 acceptable spellings (learned and learnt) you can see that one is much more popular than the other- although both are right.  It is fascinating, and very addictive and promises to be a wonderful tool for teachers of languages as well as social science subjects.

The one difficulty with this sample is that it is only of written published English. The team are now collecting language form newspapers and the Internet and expect this to provide a wider sample which will reflect closer to spoken English. It’s just one idea of the many ways you can improve your English when you spend some time with us at UIC London