The Speech That Cost Nearly a Billion Dollars

 

Have you ever said something that you ended up immediately regretting or wanted to take back straight away? Well, unless your words cost someone nearly a billion dollars, then you haven’t messed up quite as bad as Gerald Ratner did back in 1991. Yet.

Ratner was the CEO of the Ratners Group, jewellers that shook up the usually stiff and inflexible jewellery market by aiming some of its products at the working class through a chain of shops colloquially known as “Ratners.” Although the chain was widely ridiculed and considered “gaudy,” “tacky” and “cheap” by the press and other jewellers, many wanting to buy jewellery and not break the bank flocked to the stores, turning Ratners into a household name throughout England in the 1980s.

This unprecedented move was primarily spearheaded by Ratner himself and it turned what was once a small, family-owned chain into a billion dollar business, threatening other jewellers the world over- if everyone owns and wears jewellery, and it is sold cheaply, it loses much of its prestige and perceived value which has long made certain mostly worthless jewellery items extremely expensive.

Ratner started working for the company in 1965 when he was a fresh-faced teen. In the 19 years he worked for the company, it made almost no market headway. When he inherited the company in 1984, he expanded it from about 150 shops to over 2,000 in just six years, capturing over 50% of the UK’s jewellery market.  Ratner appeared to be a business prodigy.

In his autobiography, Gerald Ratner: The Rise and Fall… and Rise Again, Ratner claimed that his success in the 1980s was down to an experience he had when he was younger at Petticoat Lane Market. At this market, Ratner noticed that it wasn’t the vendors selling the best goods that got the most sales or interest from customers, it was the vendors who yelled the loudest and had the most garish, eye-catching displays.

Ratner eagerly applied this concept to his own business when he took over the Ratner Group in 1984, and he made sure that all of the shops in the Ratners chain had bright orange displays that loudly advertised their prices and deals.

This, combined with the rock-bottom prices the chain was offering, saw sales explode. At the peak of his company’s success, Ratner was invited to speak to the Institute of Directors, a group of high-powered businessmen and journalists, about how he’d made his company so big so fast. The speaking engagement, which Ratner himself now refers to as “the speech,” has since gone down as one of the biggest blunders in business history.

Though the speech was going well for a while, the fateful moment came when a person in attendance innocently asked Ratner how his company was able to afford to sell things so cheaply; his now infamous response was as follows:

…We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, ‘How can you sell this for such a low price?’ I say, because it’s total crap.

He went on to say that some of the earrings sold by the Ratner Group were

cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn’t last as long.

Though Ratner claims he intended the comments as a joke (though from the sound of it a joke at the expense of his customers) and thought because it was a private event that nothing said would be reported to the public, the journalists listening didn’t see it that way on either count, and the very next day his comments were national news. The effect on the company’s profits were practically instantaneous. Almost overnight shares in the company dropped by £500 million or around $800 million (about £936 million / $1.6 billion today) and customers began avoiding Ratners stores like the plague. The phrase “doing a Ratner” entered the English lexicon as a term for really screwing up.

Just a year after Ratner’s speech, Ratners stores began closing down by the hundreds, resulting in thousands of jobs being axed. The company claimed that the dramatic loss of profits was due to “a shift in consumer spending habits,” which is kind of true in a sense, but it’s pretty obvious from the five hundred million pound punch to the gut they received just a year prior, that it was really due to Ratner’s speech.

Ratner resigned in November of 1992 and the company, in an effort to distance itself further from Ratner, unceremoniously re-branded themselves as the “Signet Group” in 2002.

Though his speech had cost his company hundreds of millions of dollars, Ratner himself came out of the scandal relatively unscathed, as noted in this interview with him, “I sold my shares on the day I left. I didn’t make anything. The only good news was that the £1billion owed to the bank stayed with the company rather than me.”

He then managed to acquire a few million pounds by mortgaging his house and investing the money in various business ventures, such as a health club business that he sold in 2001 for £3.9 million (adjusted for inflation about £5.6 million today or about $9.4 million).

These days, he runs a jewellery business with an estimated value of about £35 million or $59 million. When he’s not doing that, Ratner occasionally earns extra money by giving speeches at business conventions.

I tell people that having a setback, whether it’s going bankrupt, being divorced or ill, doesn’t mean it is the end of you. Getting my audience to laugh puts me on a huge high and people now realise I am no longer the arrogant snob they thought I was.

REFERENCE

 http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/04/speech-cost-nearly-billion-dollars/

VOCABULARY

Arrogant	kibirli
Attendance	katılma, katılım
Axe	iptal etmek, budamak
Blunder	hata yapmak, pot kırmak
Bright	parlak, muhteşem, ışıltılı
Butler	uşak, kahya
Capture	esir almak, ele geçirmek
Colloquially	halk arasında, konuşma diliyle
Crap	saçma, değersiz şey, çöp, pislik
Cut-glass	kesme cam
Decanter	durultucu, sürahi
Display	sergilemek, ekran, görüntü
Eagerly	istekle
End up	sonuçlanmak
Fateful	vahim, önemli
Flock	sürü, üşüşmek, akın etmek
Garish	gösterişli, parlak
Gaudy	şatafatlı
Go bankrupt	iflas etmek
Go down	makvolmak, azalmak, tarihe geçmek
Inflexible	eğilmez, inatçı
Inherit	miras olarak almak
Innocently	masumca
Instantaneous	ani, anlık
Mess up	ortalığı dağıtmak, mahvetmek
Mortgage	ipotek, rehin
Prodigy	deha, mucize
Rebrand	marka değiştirmek
Ridicule	alay etmek, dalga geçmek
Screw up	buruşturmak, altüst etmek
Setback	ötelemek, mal olmak
Snob	züppe
Stiff	katıi sert, çetin
Tacky	yapış yapış, pejmürde
Unceremoniously	teklifsizce
Unprecented	emsalsiz
Unscathed	zarar görmemiş, burnu bile kanamamış
Vendor	satıcı, sağlayıcı
Yell	bağırmak, çığırmak

GRAMMAR= KATEGORİLERİNE AYRILMIŞ ŞEKİLDE BAĞLAÇLAR

Sayfamızı beğenerek paylaşımlardan haberdar olabilirsiniz :)

KAYNAK=REMZİ HOCA

TODAY'S ARTICLE: How to rewire the eye

How to rewire the eye

Transforming nerve cells into light-sensing cells aims to restore sight in some blind patients

A man who had been blind for 50 years allowed scientists to insert a tiny electrical probe into his eye.

The man’s eyesight had been destroyed and the photoreceptors, or light-gathering cells, at the back of his eye no longer worked. Those cells, known as rods and cones, are the basis of human vision. Without them, the world becomes gray and formless, though not completely black. The probe aimed for a different set of cells in the retina, the ganglion cells, which, along with the nearby bipolar cells, ferry visual information from the rods and cones to the brain.

No one knew whether those information-relaying cells still functioned when the rods and cones were out of service. As the scientists sent pulses of electricity to the ganglion cells, the man described seeing a small, faint candle flickering in the distance. That dim beacon was a sign that the ganglion cells could still send messages to the brain for translation into images.

That 1990s experiment and others like it sparked a new vision for researcher Zhuo-Hua Pan of Wayne State University in Detroit. He and his colleague Alexander Dizhoor wondered if, instead of tickling the cells with electricity, scientists could transform them to sense light and do what rods and cones no longer could.

The approach is part of a revolutionary new field called optogenetics. Optogeneticists use molecules from algae or other microorganisms that respond to light or create new molecules to do the same, and insert them into nerve cells that are normally impervious to light. By shining light of certain wavelengths on the molecules, researchers can control the activity of the nerve cells.

Optogenetics is a powerful tool for probing the inner workings of the brain . In mice, researchers have used optogenetics to study feeding behavior , map aggression circuits  and even alter memories. 

Open sesame

Optogenetics involves inserting an algae protein into a nerve cell’s membrane. In the dark, the protein, called channelrhodopsin-2, or ChR2, is closed. When blue light hits it, the channel opens and allows ions to flow in. That triggers the cell to send a signal to other cells.
Credit: Eye: John Martin Barrett et al/Visual Neuroscience 2014 (CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0), adapted by J. HIRSHFELD

After years of work with animals, researchers are now poised to insert optogenetic molecules into the retinal cells of people. The aim is to restore vision in those whose rods and cones don’t work.

“It makes sense that the organ that is light sensitive would benefit from [optogenetics] first,” says José-Alain Sahel, director of the Vision Institute in Paris. He is involved in one of two efforts to bring optogenetics out of the lab and into the eye clinic.

Studies in people could begin next year.

Circumvent the damage

Optogenetics is, at its heart, a gene therapy. Traditional gene therapy places a healthy copy of a mutated or damaged gene into the cells of a person with an inherited condition. The healthy copy is first packed into a virus. The virus delivers the gene to the “broken” cells and unloads its cargo. Once inside the cell, the gene produces functional copies of the proteins that the original mutations damaged, and the cell starts working again.

This type of gene therapy has famously been used to treat children born with faulty immune systems. It has also restored some vision in people with a rare type of inherited blindness called Leber congenital amaurosis .

That type of blindness, however, is the absolute best-case scenario for gene therapy, says neuroscientist Botond Roska. LCA patients eligible for gene therapy still have light-gathering rods and cones in their retinas but the cells don’t work properly because they have a mutation in a gene called RPE65 (one of a dozen gene mutations that can cause LCA). Introducing the normal version of the gene allows the rods and cones to function again. However, two studies published online this month in the New England Journal of Medicine suggest that even in patients who experience vision improvements after gene therapy for LCA, the photoreceptors continue to die and vision deteriorates over time (SN Online: 5/3/15). This could mean that, for long-term benefit, another approach is needed.

Most people with inherited blindness don’t even have the hope of temporary restoration. Mutations in any of more than 250 genes may lead to blindness, says John Flannery, a cell and molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Gene therapy is currently impractical or impossible for most of those diseases, he says.

Approximately 200,000 people in the United States have inherited retinal diseases that affect the rods and cones, according to estimates from the Foundation Fighting Blindness. Once those photoreceptors are gone, there’s no bringing them back, says Roska, of the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland.

The optogenetics approach that Pan and others are studying circumvents the missing photoreceptors. That means it differs from traditional gene therapy in important ways: It doesn’t fix broken genes, so the therapy should work regardless of which of the 250 genes are causing problems. And instead of trying to resurrect dead or damaged photoreceptors, the scientists aim to transform relay cells into ersatz photoreceptors.

Pan and Dizhoor began kicking around the idea of making bipolar and ganglion cells light sensitive in 2000. In principle it sounded simple: Just move the rods’ light-sensing protein, known as rhodopsin, to the other cells. But rhodopsin doesn’t work alone. It is part of a light-driven machine in the eye that has more than a dozen parts, says Dizhoor, a molecular biologist now at Salus University in Elkins Park, Pa. “Technically, it’s just unfeasible” to move that many cogs, he says. The researchers needed a simple molecule that could make ganglion and bipolar cells sensitive to light.

The breakthrough came two years later when scientists discovered a light-responsive protein called channelrhodopsin in a single-celled algae called Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.

A gaggle of ganglion cells

The experiment was just the first step toward restoring vision, though. Researchers have had to wrangle with the issue of which of the cells — ganglion or bipolar — might restore the most vision. Each type of cell has its pros and cons.
To understand the dilemma requires some clarity on how the eye works. Light enters the eye through the pupil and is focused on the retina, a thin, multilayer tissue in the back of the eye.
Light first encounters the retinal ganglion cells. These nerve cells have long tails that bundle together to form the optic nerve and send messages to the brain about what the eye detects. They aren’t normally light sensitive. Neither are the bipolar cells, the next layer of cells that light hits. Below both these layers, at the very back of the eye, are the light-detecting rods and cones. Bipolar cells collect light information from these photo­receptor cells and pass it to the ganglion cells, which send it on to the visual processing areas in the brain. Unlike mouse eyes, human eyes have a tiny window called the fovea where bipolar cells and ganglion cells sit off to the side, allowing light to shine directly on the photoreceptors.
The ganglion cells are easiest to reach, which makes them appealing for optogenetics. But human eyes contain about 20 different types of retinal ganglion cells, each of which may convey slightly different visual information to the brain.
Variety may spice up life, but it’s potentially the main strike against ganglion cells as a target for optogenetics. That’s because the viruses used to ferry optogenetic molecules cannot distinguish between the various ganglion cells. Optogeneticists and gene therapists favor viruses called adeno-associated viruses for delivering their cargo. The viruses come in a variety of packages that determine which types of cells they can infect, but no one has devised a package that will dock only with particular ganglion cell types.
The problem, then, is that optogenetic proteins could be made, and activated, in all 20 ganglion-cell varieties at the same time, including ones that send contradictory information to the brain, says Sahel, in Paris. “It’s like saying yes and no to the same thing,” he says.

photoreceptors=ışık alıcıları

vision=görüş

probe=sonda(sondalamak)

ganglion cell=gangliyon hücresi

information relaying=bilgi yayan, bilgi aktaran

pulse=nabız

flicker=titreyerek yanmak(ateş)

dim=loş

spark=tetiklemek,harekete geçirmek

tickle=gıdıklamak

optogenetics=optogenetik (Optogenetik, ışık sayesinde ve genetik yardımla beyin hücrelerini araştıran yeni gelişmekte olan bir bilim dalıdır.=

algae=algler

Circumvent =üstün gelmek, alt etmek, tuzağa düşürmek

blindness=körlük

inherited=kalıtsal

neuroscientist =nörolog

deteriorate=kötüleşmek,kötüye gitmek

impractical=elverişsiz, kullanışsız

regardless of =-e bakmaksızın,

ersatz =yapay

membrane=zar, diyafram

wrangle with=tartışmak,münakaşa etmek

dilemma=ikilem,ikilik

multilayer=çok tabakalı

bundle=toplamak,demet

fovea =(göz vb. için) çukur

spice up= renk katmak, heyecanlı hale getirmek

distinguish =ayırt etmek

contradictory i=çelişkili,tutarsız

The Origin of the Word “Soccer”

      

 

 

Today I found out the origin of the word “soccer”.  For all you out there who love to complain when Americans, and certain others, call “Football”, “Soccer”, you should know that it was the British that invented the word and it was also one of the first names of what we now primarily know of as “Football”.

 

 

In fact, in the early days of the sport among the upper echelons of British society, the proper term for the sport was “Soccer”.  Not only that, but the sport being referred to as “Soccer” preceded the first recorded instance of it being called by the singular word “Football” by about 18 years,  with the latter happening when it became more popular with the middle and lower class. When that happened, the term “Football” gradually began dominating over “Soccer” and the then official name “Association Football”.

 

 

In the 1860s, as in most of history- with records as far back as 1004 B.C.- there were quite a lot of “football” sports in existence being played popularly throughout the world and of course, England.   Many of these sports had similar rules and eventually, on October 26th, 1863, a group of teams in England decided to get together and design a standard set of rules which would be used at all their matches.  They formed the rules for “Association Football”, with the “Association” distinguishing it from the many other types of football sports in existence in England, such as “Rugby Football”.

 

 

Now British school boys of the day liked to nickname everything, which is still somewhat common.  They also liked to add the ending “er” to these nicknames.  Thus Rugby was, at that time, popularly called “Rugger”.  Association Football was then much better known as “Assoccer”, which quickly just became “Soccer” and sometimes “Soccer Football”.

 

 

The inventor of the nickname is said to be Charles Wredford Brown, who was an Oxford student around the time of Association Football’s inception.  Legend has it, in 1863 shortly after the creation of Association Football, Wredford-Brown had some friends who asked him if he’d come play a game of “Rugger”, to which he replied he preferred “Soccer”.  Whether that story’s true or not, the name caught on from around that point on.

 

 

In the beginning, the newly standardized Rugby and Soccer were football sports for “gentlemen”, primarily being played by the upper echelons of society.  However, these two forms of football gradually spread to the masses, particularly Soccer as Rugby didn’t really catch on too well with the lower classes.  This resulted in the name switching from “Soccer” and “Association Football”, to just “Football”; with the first documented case of the sport being called by the singular term “Football” coming in 1881, 18 years after it was first called “Soccer” or, officially, “Association Football”.

 

 

The game gradually spread throughout the world under the lower class name of “Football”, rather than “Soccer” as the “gentlemen” called it.  The problem was, though, that a lot of other countries of the world already had popular sports of their own they called “Football”, such as the United States, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, to name a few.  In these countries, the name “Soccer” was and, in some,  still is preferred for this reason.

 

 

Bonus Facts:

• Just as intriguing, for those who like to lambaste American Football being called such when the ball interacts primarily with hands, most of the earliest forms of Football were named thus, not because you kicked a ball with your foot, but because they were played on foot.   Peasants played most of their sports on foot; aristocrats played most of theirs on horseback.  Thus, games played on foot were called “football”, whether they had anything to do with kicking a ball or not.  Indeed, many of the earliest forms of football involved carrying balls in an attempt to get across goal lines passed some opposing team or individual players.

 

• Soccer balls were originally painted with the now classic black and white checkered look in order to make them more visible on black and white TV during the 1970 FIFA World Cup.  Naturally, people wanted to buy balls that looked like those that the professionals used on TV and thus everybody bought the black and white checkered soccer ball instead of the previous traditional solid color ball.

 

• In the United States, early on the word “Football” was incorporated in the name for Soccer.    The first name of the league was the “United States Soccer Football Association”.  This lasted about 30 years before it was shortened to simply the “United States Soccer Federation” in 1975.

 

• “Rugby” was also once known as “Football” and originally had almost the same set of rules as Soccer, though over time increasingly diverged.  The name “Rugby” comes from Rugby School in England.  Legend has it, during a Football match at that school, William Webb Ellis picked up the ball in his hands and ran with it over the goal line.  It didn’t count as an official goal, as you weren’t supposed to use your hands; but the referee remarked, it was a “jolly good ‘try'”, which, according to legend, is where that particular Rugby scoring term comes from.  The official Rugby Union was then formed in 1871 with a split in 1893 forming the Rugby League.

 

• Rugby never caught on with the lower class as Soccer did.  Thus, the famous British saying, “Soccer is a gentleman’s game played by ruffians and Rugby is a ruffian’s game played by gentlemen.”

 

• The earliest known record of a Soccer-like sport was in 1004 B.C. in Japan.  There are also many references to Soccer-like sports in 50 B.C. China, even being played between teams from China and Japan.

 

• The Romans also played several types of Football games, including some that resembled Soccer.  One of which was also included in the Roman Olympic Games.  This particular version, in the Olympic Games, featured 27 men a side.  The game was so rough that 2/3 of the players had to be hospitalized after the game.

 

• The last genuine leather soccer ball used in the World Cup was the Adidas Tango Espana, used in the 1982 World Cup.  Shortly thereafter, in 1986, the first fully synthetic World Cup soccer ball was used.

 

• The designers of the Adidas Teamgeist, used in the 2006 World Cup, claim that ball was the roundest ever made for a sport.

 

• During King Edward’s reign (1307-1327), he had laws passed against the playing of football sports.  Anyone caught playing any form of football would be imprisoned, “For as much as there is a great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls, from which many evils may arise…”

 

• He wasn’t the only British monarch that hated football.  Queen Elizabeth the First “had football players jailed for a week, with follow-up church penance”.  King Henry IV and Henry VIII also passed laws against football sports.

 

• American Football was originally known in England as “Start-Stop Rugby with Padding”… Catchy.

REFERENCE

 http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/06/the-origin-of-the-word-soccer/

VOCABULARY

Catch on	farkına varmak, anlamak
Checkered	inişli çıkışlı, karışık, damalı
Distinguish	ayırmak farkı görmek
Diverge	uyuşmamak, birbirinden uzaklaşmak
Dominate over	hakimiyet kurmak
Echelon	diziliş, aşama, kademe, basamak
Evil	günah, dert, bela, musibet, fena, kötü
Follow-up	izlemek, takip, süreklilik
Genuine	hakiki, gerçek, sahici, öz
Get across	benimsemek, açıklamak, anlaşılmasını sağlamak
Hospitalize	hastaneye yat(ır)mak, hastaneye kaldırmak
Hustle over	itişip kakışmak, dürtmek
Imprisoned	tutuklu, hapsedilmiş
Incorporate	birleş(tir)mek, kapsama almak
Interact	birbirini etkilemek, etkileşmek
Intriguing	şaşırtıcı, ilgi uyandıran
Jail	hapis, cezaevi
Lambaste	dövmek, fırça atmak, pataklamak
Nickname	lakap, takma ad
Penance	kefaret
Precede	önünden gitmek, üstün olmak
Primarily	öncelikle
Refer to	atıfta bulunmak, adlandırmak
Remark	belirtmek, yorum, görüş
Resemble	benzemek
Result in	yol açmak, sonuçlanmak
Rough	kaba, sert, pürüzlü
Ruffian	külhanbeyi, kabadayı, zorba, kavgacı
Switch	değiştirmek
Teamgeist	takım ruhu
Thereafter	(ondan) sonra

Secrets to Learning Grammar: 7 Steps to Grammar Fluency

 

Does Grammar really have to be so complicated? What if there were an easier way?

 

When learning English one of the most difficult and overwhelming things every learner is going to face is using and understanding grammar.

 

But if you would like find a way to practice and learn grammar in a very easy and quick way, a way that is going to ultimately help you internalize all these verb tenses and be able to use them without having to think very much, then you have to read this article.

 

The problem with grammar is that it is made up of such strict rules and structures that it tends to leave the student feeling like they aren’t really speaking English, but solving some kind of math equation. In this article I’m going to present you with a method I use to teach all of my students, a method which has proven to be flawless in making these boring grammar classes nothing more than a daily 10 minute routine.

Make Grammar Easy with the Tour of The Tenses

 

The “Tour of the Tenses” is an exercise I give to all of my students to do in their spare time as a way to program their brains to be able to use the right verb tense automatically without having to think too much. This is definitely one of the first steps to the path of fluency and should be done by English learners of all levels.

 

This is an exercise based on the tour of the tenses table (see below). The idea of the exercise is to write down or think of a phrase, generally with just a simple subject – verb – object structure. For example, I eat hamburgers.

 

Once you have decided on the phrase, you can now go through the tour of the tenses  conjugating your chosen phrase into all the different boxes seen on the table.

 

 

 

 

Let me take you through this process, step by step:

 

 

1. Write the phrase you wish to use, try to always use a new verb so you are always improving your vocabulary.

 

 

 

2. Look up the verb to see if it is regular or regular.

 

Ex- Eat / Ate / Eaten

 

 

3. Go through the table conjugating the verb in the affirmative form.

 

I ate  hamburgers.	I was eating hamburgers.	I had eaten  hamburgers.	I had been eating hamburgers.
I eat hamburgers.	I am eating hamburgers.	I have eaten hamburgers.	I have been eating hamburgers.
I will eat / I’m going to eat hamburgers.	I will be eating hamburgers.	I will have eaten hamburgers.	I will have been eating hamburgers.

 

4. Go through the table making negative phrases.

 

I didn’t eat  hamburgers.	I wasn’t eating hamburgers.	I had not eaten  hamburgers.	I had not been eating hamburgers.
I don’t eat hamburgers.	I am not eating hamburgers.	I have not eaten hamburgers.	I have not been eating hamburgers.
I won’t eat / I’m not going to eat hamburgers.	I will not be eating hamburgers.	I will not have eaten hamburgers.	I will not have been eating hamburgers.

 

 

5. Go through the table making Interrogative phrases.

 

Did you eat hamburgers?	Were you eating hamburgers?	Had you eaten hamburgers?	Had you been eating hamburgers?
Do you eat hamburgers?	Are you eating hamburgers?	Have you eaten hamburgers?	Have you been eating hamburgers?
Will you eat / Are you  going to eat hamburgers?	Will you be eating hamburgers?	Will you have eaten hamburgers?	Will you have been eating hamburgers?

 

 

6.  After you have mastered doing the affirmative, negative and interrogative structures, you must now start to associate each box with a time reference.

 

When speaking, one of the last things you are going to think about is what verb tense you are going to use. The next step to make this flow is to add a correct time reference to each phrase. For example,

I eat hamburgers (present simple) – everyday, sometimes, once a week

I ate a hamburger (simple past) – yesterday, last week, when I was a child

I’m going to eat a hamburger (Future simple)– tomorrow, next month, when I get home

I have eaten a hamburger (present perfect) – today, this week, this month, recently

The easier it is to associate a verb tense with the time expressions you want to use, the more you will start to flow with your spoken English, and not have to think so much when talking.

 

 

7. After this has become an automatic process, make it into a daily habit using three NEW verbs every day.

 

 

 

 

Once you can go through the whole tour of the tenses table without having to look at the worksheet, you have pretty much dissected all the most important verb tense grammar rules that sometimes take people years to learn when studying in traditional schools.

Note: There are many conjugations that aren’t on the list like conditionals, “Used to,” passive voice etc. But if you can master this whole table, then most of these other things will just come naturally and will make a lot more sense when they appear.

Call to Action

 

Here at Real Life English we believe that everyone has the right to speak English, and should be able to do this without having to pay lots of money on classes or, having to travel to all parts of the world just to learn and practice.

 

 REFERENCE

http://reallifeglobal.com/secrets-to-learning-grammar-7-steps-fluency/

 

VOCABULARY

 

Complicated	çetrefilli, karmaşık
Conjugate	birleşmek, fiil çekimi yapmak
Dissected	parçalara ayrılan
Equation	denge, eşitlik
Flawless	kusursuz
Go through	araştırmak
Overwhelming	ezici, baskın
Ultimately	en sonunda

 

Why Women Fainted So Much in the 19th Century

 

 

 

Dropping like flies (or at least as far as many stories indicate), it seems as if well-bred ladies in the 1800s struggled to maintain consciousness when faced with even the slightest emotional or physical shock. Over the years there have been several theories as to why this seemed to happen, from the women’s garb to simply conforming to societal expectations.

 

 

To begin with, throughout the 19th century (among other times), ladies often wore corsets. Worn around the torso, corsets were made of a durable tightly woven fabric or leather, fashioned with channels running throughout them in which vertical ribs were inserted, called boning because they were often made with whale bone (although ivory and wood were also used).

 

 

While the purpose of the corset changed over time- sometimes meant to give a flat look, sometimes meant to give extra curves via tightening, it’s the latter fad, particularly in the Victorian era, that many propose was the cause of at least some fainting spells.

 

 

In this case, the entire device was held together, and tightened (sometimes to extremes) by a system of lacing. The archetypical corset had its laces at the back, and for the most fashionable ladies, these had to be tightened by another. Girls were started in corsets at a very young age and, for them and ladies after childbirth, waist training (to shrink the side of the waist) via super tight lacing, was common.

 

 

As a result of this particular version of corset fashion, over time, corset-wearers’ bodies changed: their ribs were displaced, their lungs were squashed, some organs were compressed against the spine and others were shoved down into the lower abdomen. In addition to making it hard to breathe, hearts struggled to pump and, guts struggled to digest what little food they could get down. As one Victorian lady is reported, “I had only eaten two bites of my biscuit there was no room beneath my corset for a third.”

Said the West Coast Times in August of 1884,

 

The evil consequences of tight lacing are universally admitted. Ladies, however, generally refuse to acknowledge that tight lacing is at all common. Each possessor of a small waist claims that it is a gift, not a work of art, and wears a corset, not for the purpose of compressing her shape into a narrow circumference, but merely as a comfortable, if not necessary support.

 

This lead to the “great corset controversy” of the 19th century.  Said one woman in a letter to the Boston Globe in January of 1893,

 

I myself have never felt any ill effects from nearly 30 years of the most severe tight lacing, nor have I yet found any authentic case of real harm being done by stays, even when laced to the utmost degree of tightness, both day and night.

 

People who write against the practice of tight lacing are either those who have never been laced and have never take the trouble to inquire into the pros and cons of the subject, or those who have, perhaps been once lace up very tightly in badly made, ill-fitting stays with the settled determination of finding them most awful instruments of torture.

 

Those who have been systematically laced up in proper stays from their childhood are the only ones who are capable of forming a right judgment on this subject and I hope you will allow tight lacers the opportunity of defending themselves against the enemies of trim little waist.

 

On the other side of the argument, in an article titled “The Slaves of Fashion,” published in the Chicago Tribune in September of 1891, it was noted,

 

It is difficult to imagine a slavery more senseless, cruel or far-reaching in its injurious consequences than that imposed by fashion on civilized womanhood during the last generation. … the tight lacing required by the wasp waist has produced generations of invalids and bequeathed to posterity suffering that will not vanish for many decades. … And in order to look stylish, thousands of women wear dress waist so tight that no free movement of the upper body is possible; indeed in numbers of instances, ladies are compelled to put their bonnets on before attempting the painful ordeal of getting into glove-fitting dress waists.

 

Whatever side of the tight laced argument a particular woman was on, whether by their suboptimal blood pressure, inability to breathe properly, or low blood sugar, it’s thought this may have been one potential cause for Victorian ladies reportedly retreating to their fainting rooms and swooning onto their fainting couches.

 

 

Another fashion-based theory is that a well dressed woman of this era wore an enormous amount of clothing, and even in the summer, such a lady had, in addition to the corset, underwear, a bustle pad, a full skirt supported by crinoline (read: horsehair) petticoats (sometimes lined with steel hoops) and a bonnet. Some may have fainted from overheating, while others may have collapsed under the sheer weight of their garments which would have been more difficult to handle combined with the other aforementioned cinching aspects. (This could also be dangerous for other reasons.  For instance, the wife of famed poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow tragically died when she accidentally dropped a burning match onto her hoop skirt. Her clothing burst into flames. Even after the fire was smothered, it was not an easy task to remove the cindered clothing.)

 

 

Another potential contributor sometimes pointed to in trying to explain some of the swooning could have been chronic poisoning. During the 19th century, while people knew that arsenic was poisonous, they didn’t seem to know (or care) that environmental exposure from its fumes could also have a deleterious effect. As such, and given its utility in certain applications, it was widely used in the manufacture of everything from fabrics to paints to the paper in which food was wrapped; in fact, by the end of the 1800s, 80% of all wallpaper was arsenic-laced.

 

 

Arsenic poisoning has a variety of symptoms including headaches, cold sweats, and fainting. There was an 1880 report of a woman who had “fainting fits almost daily,” until she was moved to another room in her home that wasn’t furnished with arsenic-tainted wallpaper – where she recovered a few weeks later.

 

 

In addition, arsenic, along with lead, mercury and other such toxic substances, were commonly found in makeup during the Victorian era. (see: Why Lead is Bad for Humans)  Lead was also a common ingredient in hair dyes and was frequently found in wine (along with arsenic and copper). Together, these toxins contributed to more wealthy Victorians suffering from seizures (and, theoretically, swooning) when compared with their poorer neighbors who couldn’t afford such luxuries.

 

 

All that said, it is highly likely that some (or even the majority) of this swooning was put on. You see, besides potential side effects from the fad of extreme tight lacing of corsets or other such things, for a time, swooning at the least hint of a shock also became expected and downright ladylike. (This also made it a great literary device in stories.) Women, particularly of high station, were expected to act the role of a delicate flower, while men were expected to be hard as nails. (see: In Which Teddy Roosevelt Makes Men Everywhere Feel a Little Less Manly)

 

 

Swooning was simply one method of a woman showing her delicate nature in the form of an extreme emotional reaction to a particular event. Today, simply gasping might be the best social-cue equivalent. Similarly, people rarely laugh when by themselves, even when finding something incredibly humorous.  In fact, contrary to popular belief, most laughter is not associated with humor, but rather stems from non-humor related social interactions.  This was noted in a study covering over 2,000 cases of naturally occurring laughter, almost none of which stemmed from jokes or other such humor devices.  Most cases were simple, short “ha ha’s” during otherwise normal conversations.  These short laughs almost never interrupted speech, but rather occurred during breaks, providing social cues to those around.  So in the 19th century, swooning was just another form of accepted social cue for ladies to have in their toolbox, whether they literally were fainting or just, more likely in most cases, making a show of it.

 

 

Beyond this, the ladies also had another potential incentive for swooning.  You see, at the time, well-to-do women often had something called a “fainting room”.  This was a room for the woman to recover from a fainting spell and other forms of so-called hysteria.  Besides just getting to relax in piece on a comfortable fainting chair, there was another benefit. A doctor or midwife could be called to attend to a woman who was suffering from some form of hysteria, which included symptoms of swooning, among other things.

 

 

And by “attend to”, we mean give vigorous pelvic massage, whether manually with their hands or using a water massager, if attending to the woman in their offices or other location that had one. This went on until the lady in question was relieved, curing her of her hysteria. This was also a boon to doctors at the time who otherwise tended to be avoided by the general public unless absolutely necessary. Treating female hysteria, though, was something women who had the money often needed done regularly and were more than happy to pay.

 

 

However, this was very time consuming and could require some amount of physical exertion for the midwife or doctor in question, particularly if they had to attend to multiple ladies in the same day in this way, with “doctors lamented that treating hysterics taxed their physical endurance.” In this case, the husband could potentially also be called in to help. Later, this practice, and the cramped hands of physicians throughout Europe and North America, led to the invention of the vibrator for quickly relieving such “hysteria,” saving the physicians significant time and effort.  In the early 20th century as houses wired up with electricity became more and more common, the vibrator for this use became something of a common household item for those who could afford one. With it, you didn’t even need to necessarily call the doctor to relieve hysteria.

REFERENCE

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/05/women-fainted-much-19th-century/

 

VOCABULARY

 

Acknowledge	kabullenmek, onaylamak
Admit	itiraf etmek, izin vermek
Aforementioned	yukarıda geçen, bahsi geçen
Archetypical	prototipik, numune olarak
Authentic	özgün, hakiki
Bequeath	miras bırakmak, vasiyet etmek
Bonnet	bone, başlık, kaput
Burst into	aceleyle girmek, birden -e başlamak
Bustle	telaş etmek, acele etmek
Cinch	sımsıkı sarmak
Cindered	kül, yakarak toz haline getirmek
Circumference	çember, daire
Collapse	yığılmak, çökmek
Compel	zorlamak, mecbur etmek
Compress	sıkıştırmak, bastırmak
Consequence	netice, sonuç
Corset	korse
Deleterious	sağlığa zararlı, fena
Delicate	narin, hassas
Digest	sindirmek, hazmetmek
Displace	yerinden çıkarmak, yerinden etmek
Downright	tamam, dürüst, açık(sözlü)
Durable	sağlam, dayanıklı
Face with	yüzyüze gelmek
Fad	heves, geçici moda, moda çılgınlığı
Fainting	bayılma
Furnished with	ile döşeli
Garb	giydirmek, kılık kıyafet
Garment	elbise, giysi
Get down	moralini bozmak, şevkini kırmak
Get into	giymek, içeri girmek, uyum sağlamak
Handle	idare etmek, işlemek
Humorous	gülünç, komik, mizahi
Inquire	soru sormak, araştırmak
Insert	içine sokmak, eklemek
Interrupt	sekte vurmak, söze karışmak, araya girmek
Lacing	bağlama, bağcık
Merely	yalnızca, sadece
Ordeal	çile, çetin sınav, ateşten gömlek
Posterity	soy, nesil, gelecek nesiller
Pump	şişirmek, pompalamak, ayakkabı
Senseless	anlamsız, saçma
Sheer	büsbütün, düpedüz
Shove down	aşağı kıpırdamak
Shrink	küçültmek, küçülmek
Smother	boğmak, bunalmak
Spell	anlamına gelmek, diye okunmak,
Squash	ezilmek, bastırmak, sıkışmak
Stem from	-den kaynaklanmak
Struggle	çabalamak
Suboptimal	en uyguna yakın, yetersiz, standart altı
Swoon	bayılmak, kendinden geçme
Tightening	sıkma, sıkıştırma
Torture	eziyet, işkence
Trim	kırpmak, azaltmak
Injurious	ziyankar, kırıcı, incitici
Utmost	son nokta, en yüksek
Well-bred	soylu