Words, Words



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Internet words

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Phubbing
But, what is phubbing?






You should read this too:






Health & Fitness 


Teens' compulsive texting can cause neck injury, experts warn 











Experts warn teens that excessive texting in the wrong position can cause a spinal injury called 'text neck'
'Text neck': Teens at risk of spinal injury from constant cellphone use
Dean Fishman, a chiropractor in Florida, was examining an X-ray of a 17-year-old patient's neck in 2009 when he noticed something unusual. The ghostly image of her vertebral column showed a reversal of the curvature that normally appears in the cervical spine — a degenerative state he'd most often seen in middle-aged people who had spent several decades of their life in poor posture.
"That's when I looked over at the patient," Fishman says. She was slumped in her chair, head tilted downward, madly typing away on her cellphone. When he mentioned to the patient's mother that the girl's posture could be causing her headaches, he got what he describes as an "emotional response." It seemed the teen spent much of her life in that position. Right then, Fishman says, "I knew I was on to something."






He theorized that prolonged periods of tilting her head downward to peer into her mobile device had created excessive strain on the cervical spine, causing a repetitive stress injury that ultimately led to spinal degeneration. He began looking through all the recent X-rays he had of young people — many of whom had come in for neck pain or headaches — and he saw the same thing: signs of premature degeneration.
Fishman coined the term "text neck" to describe the condition and founded the Text Neck Institute (text-neck.com), a place where people can go for information, prevention and treatment.
"The head in neutral has a normal weight" of 10 to 12 pounds, says Fishman, explaining that neutral position is ears over shoulders with shoulder blades pulled back. "If you start to tilt your head forward, with gravity and the distance from neutral, the weight starts to increase."






A recent study in the journal Surgical Technology International quantified the problem: As the head tilts forward 15 degrees from neutral, the forces on the cervical spine and supporting musculature increase to 27 pounds. As the tilt increases, the forces increase to 40 pounds at 30 degrees, 49 pounds at 45 degrees and 60 pounds at 60 degrees.
"When your head tilts forward, you're loading the front of the disks," says Dr. Kenneth Hansraj, study author and chief of spine surgery at New York Spine Surgery & Rehabilitation Medicine. Though the study didn't look at long-term effects of this position, Hansraj says that, after seeing approximately 30,000 spinal surgery patients, he's witnessed "the way the neck falls apart."
He explains, "When you're eccentrically loading the spine, you're going to get cracks in the disks, slipped disks or herniated disks. This leads to stenosis or blockage of the spine."






In addition, Fishman says, text-neck posture can lead to pinched nerves, arthritis, bone spurs and muscular deformations. "The head and shoulder blades act like a seesaw. When the head goes forward, the shoulder blades will flare out … and the muscles start to change over time."
Much like tennis elbow doesn't occur only in people who play tennis, text neck isn't exclusive to people who compulsively send text messages. Hansraj says people in high-risk careers include dentists, architects and welders, whose heavy helmets make them especially vulnerable. He adds that many daily activities involve tilting the head down, but they differ from mobile-device use in intensity and propensity.






"Washing dishes is something nobody enjoys, so you do it quickly. And while your head is forward, it's probably tilted at 30 or 40 degrees," he says. People tend to change position periodically while reading a book, and they glance up frequently while holding an infant. But mobile devices are typically held with the neck flexed forward at 60 degrees or greater, and many users, particularly teens, use them compulsively. The study reports that people spend an average of two to four hours a day with their heads tilted at a sharp angle over their smartphones, amounting to 700 to 1,400 hours a year.
To remedy the problem, Hansraj has a simple message: "Keep your head up." While texting or scrolling, people should raise their mobile devices closer to their line of sight. The Text Neck Institute has developed the Text Neck Indicator, an interactive app that alerts users when their smartphones are held at an angle that puts them at risk for text neck ($2.99, available for Android; in development for iPhone).
Fishman also recommends that people take frequent breaks while using their mobile devices, as well as do exercises that strengthen muscles behind the neck and between the shoulder blades in order to increase endurance for holding the device properly.
He adds, "I'm an avid technology user — and I use it in the proper posture."
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Exercises to ease the strain of 'text neck'
If you're not mindful of your body alignment, engaging with mobile devices for long periods of time can wreak havoc on your spine. This behavior can result in muscle strain, a straightening of the normal curvature of the cervical spine, disk compression, slipped disks, pinched nerves and arthritis. Here are some exercises that can help prevent and relieve "text neck":
Neck stretches Increasing the range of motion in the neck keeps the cervical spine flexible and helps maintain its normal curvature. Gentle stretches relieve neck tension as well as lengthen muscles that may have shortened due to chronic poor posture.
First, relax your shoulders and nod your head "yes" and "no" slowly a few times. Then, holding one arm behind your back, grasp the side of your head with your opposite hand and press gently, tilting your head to the side until you feel a gentle stretch. Hold for 20 seconds. Next, tilt your chin up and hold for 20 seconds; tilt your chin down and hold for 20 seconds. Repeat on the other side.
Chest opener Expanding the chest muscles helps to counteract slumped posture.
Stand in a doorway with your arms held out from the body like a T, forearms resting on each doorjamb at a 90-degree angle to upper arms. Next, lean your body forward through the doorway, leading with your sternum until you feel a gentle stretch across your chest. Hold for 20 seconds. Now move your arms up the door jamb so they are positioned like a V and repeat the forward stretch, again holding for 20 seconds.
Shoulder, upper back and neck muscle strengtheners Strong muscles in the back of the neck and between the shoulder blades will support proper posture, preventing muscle strain and spinal degeneration. With more strength, you will be able to comfortably hold your mobile device in your line of sight without having to bend your neck forward and hunch over. Here are two exercises that help strengthen these postural support muscles:
Wall angels If you've ever made snow angels, you can use a similar movement to strengthen your shoulder muscles while standing against a wall. First, stand with your heels, back and head resting against a wall. Hold arms perpendicular to the body with the forearms pointing upward at a 90-degree angle to your upper arms. Press your shoulder blades back and down. Keeping your arms bent at a 90-degree angle, move them slowly overhead without letting them lift from the wall. Next, move arms slowly down until your upper arms touch the sides of your body. (Forearms are still perpendicular to upper arms, and shoulder blades are still locked down.) Do 12 repetitions.






Sky diver Lying face-down on a mat or other firm, comfortable surface, hold your arms straight over your head at an angle so your body forms the shape of a Y. Lift your upper torso from the mid-back, leading with your sternum and keeping your chin down so your neck is aligned with your spine. Hold for 30 seconds, then release. Next, still lying face-down, hold your arms straight out to the sides so your body forms the shape of a T. Rotate your arms so your thumbs are pointing skyward. Once again, lift your upper torso from the mid-back, leading with your sternum and keeping your chin down. While maintaining the upper body lift, pinch your shoulder blades together as you slowly lift and lower your arms for 12 repetitions.


So, everyone is crazy about these:


But this is what museums think:

Language tip of the week: Easter words




In this weekly post, we bring more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary to English language learners. These tips are usually based on areas of English which learners find difficult, e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc.
This week, we look at some Easter vocabulary.
Easter is movable feast. The term itself describes a Sunday in March or April when Christians celebrate the time when Jesus Christ died then returned to life according to the Bible. It also refers to the holiday period that includes Easter day. Here are some more useful terms to know:
Easter egg (noun)
1 a chocolate egg that you give to someone as a present at Easter
2 an egg that children decorate in celebration of Easter
Cultural note: Children often go on Easter egg hunts to find eggs that have been hidden around their home by the Easter bunny.
Easter Sunday (noun)





A couple of days ago one of my students, Alberto, posed an interesting question after warching a video about the new MacBook. Could it be said, "13mm thin", or "13 mm thick"? He argued that we normally say "the big" adjective, in examples such as "13 years old", "2 metres tall" or "3 hours long"

From my point of view, we use the adjective that interests us more, thus, 13 mm THIN, as we want to emphasize thinness.

Here's another explanation:

"old" is an adjective, of course. 
"fifty years" is a noun phrase used as an adverb answering the question "how (old)?". 

How old is he? = adverb adjective verb pronoun. 

The pattern is NUMBER + UNIT + DIMENSION-ADJECTIVE 

Numbers: 3, 6, 10, 20, 75, ... 

Dimension adjective: old Corresponding Units: years, days, months, ... 
Dimension adjective: long Corresponding Units: miles, feet, yards, meters, light-years 
Dimension adjective: wide Corresponding Units: (same as for length) 

From this we get "How long?" "Five meters long." "How old?" "Fifty years old." "How deep?" "A millimeter deep." ... 

Exception: It's not "25 degrees hot", just "25 Degrees.

I hope it's clearer now!





Hello! To begin the week with a smile, here is the opinion of an English native speaker on his favourite Spanish words. What are yours? Comments welcome!

My Favorite Spanish Words
By Ed M. Wood.


Head Desvelado1Head Botellon2Head Friolero
When I left university I felt like I was bursting through a set of saloon swing doors, arms loaded with qualifications about to hold up the professional world until they handed over the job of my dreams. I think many graduates feel like this, and this misplaced confidence compounds the disappointment when the professional world shrugs its collective shoulders.
My reaction to this disappointment was to turn my back on the opportunity vacuum and stock up on soft skills. I googled for TEFL courses in Spain, found a charming townlet called Zamora in Castilla y Leon and booked myself a one-way ticket. My Spanish education, albeit informal, started almost as soon as we touched down. I was tasked with navigating my way across Madrid weighed down by my backpack and an oppressive, immovable mid-summer mugginess.
Your relationship with new words is shaped to some extent by the context in which you learn them. Whenever I hear words like estación de trenes (train station), vía (track) and billete (ticket), images of hulking, dusty mazes of misinformation arise in bubbles of residual dread. I consider this part one of my Spanish education, which I would revisit every time I tangled with foreign bureaucracy or indulged in awkward small talk, often ending up feeling inadequate and unpractised. Part two was the polar opposite: education through warm discussion with heated housemates; bar room jibes and living room jest; and the daily, routine exchanges with familiar faces in familiar places.
The following is a list of my favorite words from two years of part two. I sincerely hope you enjoy it, and look forward to your input as to your favorite foreign words.

1. Leche (noun) - Milk

01 Leche V2
You can’t do much with milk in English. If you spill it, you can cry over it, but that’s about it. One of the first things which struck me on my arrival on the Iberian peninsula was the apparent fascination with milk. Excitement, disbelief, good fortune, bad fortune, admiration… could seemingly all be expressed with the help of milk. Don’t believe me? Consider the following, entirely fabricated exchange:
El jugador de fútbol corría a toda leche cuando uno de sus oponentes le dio una leche en la pierna.
  • The soccer player was running at full speed when one of his opponents hit him on his leg.
Ay la leche”, gritó el jugador al caerse al suelo.
  • Damn it”, cried the player as he fell to the floor.
Un espectador en el estadio comentó a su amigo, “¡Qué mala leche! Ese futbolista es la leche, y si está herido no va a poder jugar en la final, ¡Me cago en la leche!
  • A spectator in the stadium turned to his friend, “That was out of order! He’s the best, and if he’s injured he’s not going to be able to play in the final. Bloody hell!
Su amigo le respondió, “no te pongas de mala leche, tio. No me parece tan serio. Se levantará y seguirá jugando. Lo verás.”
  • His friend responded, “don’t get into a bad mood, man. It doesn’t look that serious. He’ll get up and continue playing. You’ll see.”
Y una leche”, dijó el espectador abatido.
  • No way”, said the spectator, dejected.
So you see, if you memorise the above expressions, you can really milk that leche.

2. Polvo (noun) - Dust

02 Polvo V1
“Dust” is a surprisingly versatile word in English: a footballer may receive a particularly hard tackle and kiss the dust, only to receive an apology from the opposing player once the game is over and the dust has settled. As you grow up, your favorite teddy bear may be left in a corner to gather dust, only to be dusted off once the next generation of bear huggers comes along. Just like in English, you can bite the dust, or morder el polvo, in Spanish, although I wouldn’t recommend it.
Si estás hecho polvo - if you’re made (into) dust - then you’re ground down, exhausted, knackered, whacked, and si estás hecho polvo de la cabeza then you’re stir crazy, nuts or out to lunch. And si haces polvo a alguien, then you make someone (into) dust, meaning you wipe the floor with someone in a competition. So you get the picture: if you’re polvo, then you’ve been pulverised.
But Spanish also uses some idioms that bear a more tenuous connection to the tiny particles that we call dust. For reasons that remain unbeknown to me, polvoalso refers to the sexual act. So if you’re prudish (or mojigato; another one of my favorite words which didn’t make it into this list), then avert your gaze now… Look up the phrase echar un polvo and you’ll see the definition realizar el acto sexual, whilst if you say someone has a polvo - alguien tiene un polvo - it means you find them sexually attractive. There we have it; many shades of grey to this dust.

3. Resaca (noun) - Hangover

03 Resaca V2
Resaca is one of those words that many English speakers will already know, like tapas, burrito, cargo, guerrilla, chorizo, and armada, without knowing the original or alternative meanings. Did you know that burrito means “little donkey”; guerillameans “little war” (making the popular collocation “guerilla warfare” kind of redundant, although guerilla fare sounds like a poorly spelled circus act); and un chorizo can also mean un ladrón (a thief), making it theoretically possible for a chorizo to run away with your chorizo. Going back to the resaca, though, as I have a terrible tendency to do: tener resaca means “to have a hangover” in everyday parlance, but la resaca also refers to the undertow or undercurrent which leaves debris and driftwood scattered across a shore following a storm, and it is this playful imagery that endears me to the word.

4. Botellón (noun) - Public drinking

04 Botellon V1
Botellón is the augmentative form of botella (bottle), so el botellón would literally translate as “the big bottle”. As any visiting Erasmus student will recall (although this may depend upon just how big the bottle was), un botellón is much more than a supersized coke container. Descend upon a public square and you’ll be met by hundreds of buoyant youths riding towards a sugar high on a wave of calimocho, a surprisingly potent mix of wine and coke which betrays all the stereotypes of Spain as a nation of fine-wine-worshippers. Botellón-ing has become such a feature of Spanish youth culture that further terms have been spawned, including botellódromo - an official space for the execution of botellones - and macro-botellón which, as you may have guessed, is even bigger than a big bottle, although it remains unclear at what point a botellón becomes a macro-botellón.

5. Vergüenza (noun) - Embarrassment/Shame

05 Verguenza V1
Vergüenza falls somewhere between shame and embarrassment depending upon the sentence into which it falls. ¡Qué vergüenza! would translate as “how embarrassing!”, while if I were to say to you ¡Qué poca vergüenza tienes! I would be castigating you for “having no shame”. But my choice of vergüenza comes not from its breadth of use but rather its involvement in two delightful terms: la de la vergüenza and vergüenza ajenaLa de la vergüenza translates as “the one of the shame”, and refers to the final piece of food left on a shared plate that no one dares to pluck for fear of being banned from all future tapas-oriented activities. Vergüenza ajena is the Spanish equivalent of that popular “untranslatable” German word Fremdscham; the feeling of embarrassment or shame that one feels on behalf of the perpetrator of the shameful or embarrassing act.

6. Friolero/Caluroso (adj) - Sensitive to cold/heat

06 Friolero V1
The average Brit has an ingrained need to comment on the weather or enquire thereafter at any given opportunity. This is not at all unusual when you take into account how imminently changeable and whimsical weather is in the British Isles. What’s more surprising is that it’s the Spanish, with their hazy days and sun-filled plights, who have two common words which the English could really do with: friolero and caluroso. The adjectives are used to describe someone who is particularly sensitive to cold (friolero) or heat (caluroso). So next time someone complains of the cold in clement times, tell them to stop being so friolero.

7. Desvelado (adj) - Unable to sleep because you are kept awake by something or someone

07 Desvelado V1
Estuve toda la noche desvelado”, murmured my compañero de piso, or flatmate. He had just appeared from his bedroom, grumpy and confused, and so most probably unsympathetic to my need to know what on earth desvelado meant. It is in these situations that your mind races for connotations, associations, roots, derivatives, generalisable meanings of prefixes; anything that affords a stable enough foundation on which to estimate a response.
Des-” is a negative prefix, so likely referred to the absence of something, so now I just needed to work out “-velado”. I knew una vela was one of those homonyms which baffle language learners, carrying multiple meanings including “a sail”, “a candle”, and “a vigil”. If estás a dos velas, then you’re broke, penniless, with no money for electricity and just two candles; whilst si pasas la noche en vela, then you’re on vigil all night, or awake. “That’s it!”, I thought. The opposite of en vela - to abandon the state of vigilance - he’s slept so heavily that he’s now struggling to return to the world of the living. “Pues me alegro por ti, David, que bajo este calor no me puedo ni dormir”; I was happy for him, as I could never fall asleep in the sweltering Spanish summer.
He looked at me, yet more confused; “Desvelado, tío; despierto, alerta, incapaz de dormir…” Desvelado, it turned out, was another one of those words that is conspicuous by its absence in English; to be unable to sleep because something is keeping you awake, be it noisy neighbors or your latest preoccupation.

8. Agujetas (noun) - Muscle stiffness

08 Aguejetas V1
My final word on my list of favorite German words was Ahnungslosigkeit, which made it onto said list due to its euphony. Similarly, the word agujetas is a wonderfully guttural adventure which rockets and plummets between consonants and vowels whilst exercising some of the sounds that anglophones must master to mimic a Spanish accent successfully. Its phonetic merits are not the only thing which endear one to the word, however. Agujetas refer to the muscle ache, soreness or stiffness that one experiences in the days following unusual physical exertion.
The word’s approximation of the diminutive form of the Spanish word for needles (agujas dim. agujitas) immediately inculcates the image of thousands of tiny needles pricking a tired, cantankerous muscle group, although the true root of the word agujetas is not believed to lie here. One intriguing theory proposes the following sequence of semantic leaps; agujetas was used as a term for objects of little value. This then became a colloquial, dysphemistic label for the meagre tips given to postmen on horseback in the 18th century, which in turn became synonymous with the aches an inexperienced rider endures after riding a horse.
Words are just wonderful, aren’t they?
Yes.




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In this section I will incluce funny, new or just nice words.
First one: What is a hotspot?

Is this a hotspot?



Or this one?



Well, THIS is a HOTSPOT





 

3 comments:

  1. ¡Me ha encantado! Pero a mi ya me enseñaron en la facultad que quizás los angloparlantes son fantásticos con las imágenes pero los españoles somos la leche con el idioma, sobre todo cuando de tacos se trata,

    ReplyDelete
  2. Por cierto, a mi me encanta una expresión que se utiliza en el pueblo de un amigo entrañable: "¡estoy entelería!", es decir "estoy aterida" ( I'm freezing cold).

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank you for your comments. One of my favourite words is "Ea". It's useful for everything!

    ReplyDelete