Language & Opinions: Neat Top 10s from Listverse

Image from Listverse

Last year's May, I first come across Listverse and I liked it! Yesterday, I was reading Listverse's Top 10s and found some pretty interesting ones I would like to share.

First of all, since I am an English teacher and this is the English Playground, we'll start with 10 Quirky But Cool Uses of English. 

In the article, the author talked about Garden Path Sentences, Syntactic Ambiguity, Paraprosdokians, Generonyms, auto-antonyms, and synonyms, Headlinese, Malapropisms, Parataxis, Semantic Nonsense, Lexical Ambiguity and Deixis.

If you ask me, I will definitely add my favourite Portmanteau into it because it is so much fun! Oh well, I am not the author of that article.

Among all 10 Uses of English, I like Paraprosdokians, because it allows the speakers to show his superiority and creativity in his language.

XDA Elite Recognized Developer Adam Outler once said,

"Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with Windows"

Of course, he is not the first person to say it, but it was the first time I heard it, which is an amazingly witty line as in fact "failure is not an option" originally means there is no room for failure, and a success is a must. But after adding the later part, "it comes bundled with Windows", then the meaning changes to say that the Windows OS always fails and there is no escape from it as long as you use it.

The Julius Caesar example of Parataxis is cool,

"I came, I saw, I conquered"

Reminds me of the lyrics of Ludacris' Get Back, ending song for my favourite movie, Tropic Thunder,

"I came, I saw, I hit him right there in the jaw"

On another Top 10 list, Top 10 Ideas That Are Saving The World, I like the ideas of Bamboo Tumbleweed That Clears Landmines and Solar Bottle Bulb the most.

Bamboo Tumbleweed That Clears Landmines
Image from Listverse

Sweeping mines with a plunger ball, how cool is that?

Solar Bottle Bulb
Image from Listverse

Also, I never knew that light can be "captured" using a plastic bottle and some bleach. The sunlight cannot be stored and it really depends on the weather of every day, but it is better than having none at all. Simple science at work benefiting hundreds.

Image from totesmax

Lastly for not least, Top 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Pornography, truly enlightening is the fact that pornography was invented by the Victorians, never knew that they were so opened. 70% of the hotel profits from room service came from pornographic movies is another shock, then the room service staff must also be meeting porn stars 7 times out of 10 calls. What I do know is that the porn industry helped Blu-ray disc beat HD-DVD, the fluffer job, sex crimes are low in Japan, but how about some stats from other countries like the U.S. as well?

Vocabulary:
quirky -- (adj) unusual in an attractive and interesting way
failure is not an option -- there is no room for failure, and a success is a must
plunger -- (n) 

Image from visualdictionaryonline

fluffer -- (n) [C] a person employed by film studios to “arouse” the male participants prior to filming scenes



Resources:
Movie & Event: Short Circuit 2 & Happy 25th, 'Short Circuit!' @ Locky's English Playground
http://lockyep.blogspot.hk/2011/05/movie-event-short-circuit-2-happy-25th.html

Vocabulary: Do You Wordplay? -- Portmanteau @ Locky's English Playground
http://lockyep.blogspot.hk/2012/12/vocabulary-do-you-wordplay-portmanteau.html

Movie: Tropic Thunder (For Advanced level) @ Locky's English Playground
http://lockyep.blogspot.hk/2009/03/movie-tropic-thunder-for-advanced-level.html

10 Quirky But Cool Uses of English @ Listverse
http://listverse.com/2012/12/22/10-quirky-but-cool-uses-of-english/

Ludacris - Get Back (MTV Version) @ YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37aG0c23Gx4

Top 10 Ideas That Are Saving The World @ Listverse
http://listverse.com/2012/12/20/top-10-ideas-that-are-saving-the-world/

Top 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Pornography  @ Listverse
http://listverse.com/2009/02/04/top-10-things-you-didnt-know-about-pornography/

Bringing light to the poor, one liter at a time @ YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9fpolCvM-8

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/quirky?q=quirky