FLY Grzegorz Malinowski

15/02/2025

Bicycle Repair Man saved us and sent that....

28/12/2024

Follow English For All

02/10/2024

Word of the day " gregarious "
Are you gregarious ?
A gregarious person is someone who likes to be with other people.

17/08/2024

11/05/2024

Well, that's a cause and effect sequence of events, innit?

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Well, because that's the way they built them in England, and English engineers designed the first US railroads. Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the wagon tramways, and that's the gauge they used. So, why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that same wheel spacing. Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break more often on some of the old, long distance roads in England . You see, that's the spacing of the wheel ruts. So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since. And what about the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match or run the risk of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome , they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's as came up with this?', you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' ases.)  Now, the twist to the story: When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah . The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So, a major Space Shuttle design feature, of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system, was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's as. And you thought being a horse's as wasn't important? Ancient horse's as*es control almost everything. 😁😁

11/05/2024

🐶 🚫 🌳 🐕 ❌ 🌲 🐩 🙅🏽‍♂️ 🌴 🐾

Don't ask us about things other than American English. You'd be barking up the wrong tree!

07/05/2024

Drodzy moi,
Bracia i siostry angliści, bo wiem, że takich wśród znajomych mam :-)
Nadeszła pora wesprzeć kolegę w mozolnym wdrapywaniu się po szczeblach kariery i wypełnić krótką (serio!) ankietkę... Jak dobrze pójdzie, to wykorzystam ją i już po 20 z hakiem latach zostanę magistrem :-) - a magistrów nigdy dosyć.
Zatem: siostro, bracie; koleżanko i kolego... i inni. Jeśli pracujesz w branży ingliszticzerskiej, tym naszym ingliszticzerstwem się jakoś zajmujesz, poświęć kilka minut, a ja opiszę jak dzielnie wykorzystujesz mózg swój i technologie różne....
PS. Szczególnie zachęcam panów, bo jak na razie to mi tylko kobiety wypełniają ankietę :-) Tomasz Walenciak - Tłumaczenia co ty na to?

21/03/2024

How about some really simple sudoku?

The free word sudoku game maker creates a sudoku game. But instead of numbers, words are printed in the puzzle. Of course you can choose the words and adjust all neccessary options in the game.

10/02/2024

Why England is not Sexland... that was close, BTW.

History time!
England was formed by 2 major groups from what is now northern Germany: the Angles, from the Anglia Peninsula; and the Saxons, from Saxony. There were also the Jutes, from what’s now Denmark.

The Saxons settled southern England, founding the Kingdoms of Wessex (West-Saxons), Essex (East-Saxons) and Sussex (South-Saxons). The Angles settled the middle of England, with the Kingdom of Mercia (meaning “border people”) and East Anglia, and in the north of England, founding the Kingdom of Northumbria (north of the river Humber). And the Jutes founded the Kingdom of Kent (from an old Celtic word probably meaning “coastal region”). These seven Kingdoms of ancient England were known as the Heptarchy.

To cut a very long story short, the Heptarchy was finally united into one country by King Alfred of Wessex, to help defend against the Viking invasions. Alfred helped to unify the region by promoting the idea that the Anglo-Saxons were all one people. In our universe, the way he chose to do this was by using the word “Angelcynn” (derived from “Angle”) to describe all the people, in an effort to dissuade the Angles rejecting him as a foreign Saxon ruler. It worked, and the result was the whole area banding together into a single unified nation, which was eventually named England, after the Angles, not the Saxons.

The Celtic nations however continued to call the English after the Saxons: In Irish, we are the Sasanach, and in Welsh, we’re Saesneg.

So it seems that the decision of one man, Alfred of Wessex, could have started a chain of events that may have eventually created a world in which “Sexland” was a country!