Podcasts about American English

Today's English expression and dialog: Let's blow this Popsicle stand!  So…are you having fun? Not really. The food's terrible. The music is not very good.  The people are not very friendly~ Let's blow this Popsicle stand!   GET FREE LESSONS: I'm on iTunes and everywhere else they have podcasts! MAGIC MIND—Do More, Stress Less This is my DAILY LIFE FUEL! No more Starbucks coffee for me! I'm saving money and losing weight. And I still have all the energy the coffee gave me! Get some and get clean body and mind energy and help support me!    You will get a 20% discount on a one-time purchase. BUT with the code EEE20 you can get a 40% discount on a subscription! That's what I got^^ Coach Shane? I'm from the USA, I make videos and podcasts for

LetsMasterEnglish.com The Let's Master English Podcast is an English Radio show for people studying English (ESL/EFL). This podcast is LOADED with great education and entertainment…EDUTAINMENT! In this episode: Health news—this technology will touch your heart! A Scottish woman is selling something “special”! The BEST coffee in America…Coach Shane is shocked! Country Shane talks LIFE Superman, Bruce Willis, Richest American Woman and Coolio in the news Best BREAK-UP SONGS! October has a LOT to celebrate—check out Coach Shane's LIST! Lots of music requests, too! The music line-up includes: The Sounds of Silence (by whom?!) (1:48) {this is a fkn classic cover}, George Michael's “I Want Your WHAT”?! (12:57), “Alone Again Naturally” a remix version (21:50) {I'm really liking this rendition}, Elvis Costello to fit coffee (31:49), Shinedown with tremendous lyrics (34:49) {this song is on REPEAT for me these days}, Eurythmics with a banger you probably don't know (40:13), “Gangsta's Paradise” by an RIP legend (47:47), Amy Winehouse (double shot) hits us hard (54:15) {why'd she leave so fast?}, “Fire” by some sisters (1:07:36) {lit}, “Buy Me a Boat” is what MONEY can do (1:16:03) {too damn funny, amirite Coach Paul?}, Mick Jagger and Lennie Kravitz get it on in the end (1:21:11)! Please let me know what you think. Send me an email. And send me song requests/dedications, too.  DailyDictationMembers@gmail.com Get free lessons: https://www.LetsMasterEnglish.com Coach Shane? I'm from the USA, I make videos and podcasts for

Today's English expression and dialog: Social currency   Why do you give away so many lessons? I'm building my social currency. What? My online value. By sharing good lessons, people like me, they enjoy learning with me and they tell their friends.   GET FREE LESSONS: I'm on iTunes and everywhere else they have podcasts! MAGIC MIND—Do More, Stress Less This is my DAILY LIFE FUEL! No more Starbucks coffee for me! I'm saving money and losing weight. And I still have all the energy the coffee gave me! Get some and get clean body and mind energy and help support me!    You will get a 20% discount on a one-time purchase. BUT with the code EEE20 you can get a 40% discount on a subscription! That's what I got^^ Coach Shane? I'm from the USA, I make videos and podcasts for

Kelly Brakenhoff is an author of six books and an ASL interpreter from Nebraska. She has served as an interpreter for deaf and hard of hearing persons now for over 30 years. You can tell how much she likes her chosen professions by listening to her as you get to do in this episode.   Kelly is especially excited by a series of books she has started involving Duke the Deaf Dog where she introduces readers to ASL, American Sign Language. She is working to help readers, especially children, better understand the deaf and hard of hearing community. On top of everything Kelly has done, she has used the crowdfunding program, Kickstarter, to help fund her newest book. It turns out that another famous author also used this program to fund their efforts. You get to hear all about it.   I very much hope you enjoy our episode this time and that you will give us a 5 rating. Thanks for listening.   About the Guest:   Kelly Brakenhoff is an author of six books and an ASL interpreter from Nebraska, US. She divides her writing energy between two series: cozy mysteries set on a college campus, and picture books featuring Duke the Deaf Dog.  Parents, kids, and teachers love the children's books because they teach American Sign Language using fun stories. And if you like a smart female sleuth, want to learn more about Deaf culture, or have ever lived in a place where livestock outnumber people, you'll enjoy the Cassandra Sato Mystery series.   Social media links:   kellybrakenhoff.com and follow her social media or blog by using this link: https://kellybrakenhoff.com/quicklinks/   About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is an Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.     Transcription Notes* Michael Hingson  00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i  capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson  01:21 Hi, and here we are once again with unstoppable mindset, the podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected me. And the unexpected, as always, is the fun part of the podcast. We love to carry on different kinds of conversations with people learn about them. And you know what I'm going to say once again, for any of you listening out there, I'd love to have conversations with you. I'll bet you have stories that we should talk about. So definitely reach out. Michael hingson.com/podcast or Michaelhi@accessibie.com. And I'd love to chat with you. But for now, we have Kelly Brakenhoff, who is here with us. She is an author, and ASL interpreter, and a Kickstarter campaign runner par excellence. But does that elevate you are what Kelly Welcome to unstoppable mindset. How are you?   Kelly Brakenhoff  02:18 Hi, I'm great. Thank you for having me. today. I'm really excited to be talking to you.   Michael Hingson  02:24 Well, I'm really excited to have a chance to chat with you and learn all about you and and learn why you're unstoppable. When I started this podcast, because we think that everyone has a story to tell, we all have had challenges in our lives and, and we've overcome them. And it doesn't need to be a huge challenge. But still a challenge is a challenge. And when we overcome it, that's great. And when we recognize that we did something that we didn't think we can do, then I think we fall into this concept of being able to move toward a mindset of unstop ability. And so we started unstoppable mindset, and we have a lot of fun with it. Well, why don't we start with your story a little bit? Why don't you tell us about you kind of growing up or anything about that that you think we ought to know?   Kelly Brakenhoff  03:12 Well, sure. Um, yeah, I'm a fan of your, your mindset, your your podcast, I think this is just the coolest thing. So like I said, just super excited to be here today. Um, I've been an ASL interpreter for more than 30 years, and an author for just over three years. So although I'm a veteran interpreter, I'm still a baby author and publisher. I learned new things every day. So I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks. I guess. I've moved around. One thing that's interesting about me as I've moved around quite a bit. I grew up in Connecticut. I've lived in Nebraska, Boston, Hawaii, Seattle. And then now we've been in Nebraska for quite a while since Austin. Last Boston, Boston. Yes.   Michael Hingson  04:01 So can you say it pack your car and have a yard? Of course.   Kelly Brakenhoff  04:07 My uncle is from South Boston and so he married my aunt who's from upstate New York and listening to the to talk was so fun. I lived with them for a summer in college. And and I just had such is such a fun time, especially if they like had a little discussion or something you know, and they they get the voices raised and they'd start going in their accent they revert.   Michael Hingson  04:35 I lived in Winthrop, Massachusetts for three years and spent some time in the in the Boston area before then and back a little bit but I love the accent but I love Massachusetts. I love New England in general. And my wife and I have a story about Mr. Connecticut. We were going there for something and And I don't even remember what it was. And we were we were traveling the right way but we were traveling a lot further than we thought we needed to to get to Mystic So ever since I've been saying that one of the things about mystic is it moves around and doesn't stay in one place. So I'm sticking   Kelly Brakenhoff  05:17 to memory of mystic is going there on probably a sixth grade field trip. And you know afterwards, the field trip they take you through the gift shop and I bought a little pewter whale. Yeah, sure. I still have it somewhere in the bookcase somewhere in my house.   Michael Hingson  05:39 We stopped at a restaurant there. The second time we went to mystic and I'm still convinced it wasn't in the same place. It was the first time we went to a restaurant and sat right along the river and watch the drawbridge coming up, which was   Kelly Brakenhoff  05:55 that is really fun. Yeah,   Michael Hingson  05:57 definitely. Yeah. We love New England. And I hope that we get a chance to go back there. I have all sorts of stories about Boston. We went I went a lot over to Daniel hall into Quincy Market and ADA Durgan. Park. Have you ever eaten there?   Kelly Brakenhoff  06:13 I have it in there. Yes, I love Faneuil Hall.   Michael Hingson  06:16 I don't know whether Durgin Park is still open. I've heard it. I've heard that it is. But I'll have to tell you. Well, I'll tell you the story about Durgan Park. It's a Durgin Park, for those who don't know, is a restaurant that if it's still there, serves food family style, and they have tables along the side. That will seat for people. But you have to have four people, if you want to sit at one of those tables. If you have three, you sit at the long tables in the middle. If you have too long tables in the middle. They're very snotty about it. In fact, waitresses and waiters are hired to be snots. It's all an act, but they're supposed to be absolutely obnoxious. They're just what some people would say the typical clothes New England style of of being, if you will, but anyway, we go into the restaurant one night, and it was me and two other people and my guide dog Holland, who is a golden retriever with the most luscious eyes in the world. And the hostess said, you know, I'm just going to let you guys sit at one of the tables for four. So she seats us and the waitress comes over. And she says what are you people doing here? You can't sit at this table. And I said, well, the host has put it put us here. No, she didn't you just snuck in here. You can't sit at this table. And she yelled at us. And we said no. We got to sit be seated here because we have a guide dog under the table. No, you don't I don't believe that. You're not going to fool me with that. You can't sit here and she just went on. Then she goes away. And she comes back and she said you can't sit here I said, look under the table. Finally she looks. There's these eyes just staring back at her. And she just melts. And the next thing we know she goes away. One of the things about Durgin Park is that they serve a when they serve prime rib. It's a huge piece of prime rib that takes the whole plate. She comes back with this plate. She said somebody didn't eat much of their prime rib. Can I give it to the dog? And oh, it was great. But it's just fun memories of all over Boston. So I'm glad you had a chance to be there. Well, enough about me in that. So you've lived all over?   Kelly Brakenhoff  08:29 We have we've moved a lot and you haven't moved a lot recently. But when when I was younger, I moved quite a bit.   Michael Hingson  08:35 Yes. What caused you to be moving around. Um, we   Kelly Brakenhoff  08:39 grew up in Connecticut. And then in high school, my parents decided my mom's from Nebraska so and my dad's from upstate New York. So when I was in high school, we moved our family moved to Nebraska. And then when my husband and I first got married, he worked for a construction company who moved us to Hawaii for five years that works. That worked. That was a great honeymoon, We'd only been married six weeks. And so that was that was a five year honeymoon. That was awesome. Our first couple of kids were born there. And we decided that we after a year or so they really didn't get to see their grandparents very often. So he decided to move back to the mainland and we made a stop first in Seattle and then we came back to Nebraska. So we've been in here for quite a while but I really enjoyed getting to experience all the different cultures and all the different places and I also have a very soft spot in my heart for New England to   Michael Hingson  09:35 Well, it's great to live in various parts of the US shows what a wonderful and just incredible country we are with all sorts of different cultures that can really blend and meld together to form what we get to experience if we only keep the culture going as as really we are the melting pot and that just makes it so Great when we get to see that,   Kelly Brakenhoff  10:01 I totally agree i Yeah.   Michael Hingson  10:04 So how old are your kids now?   Kelly Brakenhoff  10:07 They are grown up. We have four kids, three boys and one girl. And so the oldest is 21 going to be 29. And our youngest just graduated from college last year. So he's 22 in Nebraska, and Nebraska. Huskers everybody's a Husker.   Michael Hingson  10:28 Go Huskers Go Big Red. Yep.   Kelly Brakenhoff  10:31 So um, but we have four grandkids too. So that's a lot of fun. And we're really lucky. They all live in town, so I get to see them quite a bit.   Michael Hingson  10:38 That works. So you see you fix it up. So you now have this this Braden half ghetto, if you will,   Kelly Brakenhoff  10:45 yes, my Twitter handle is actually in Brockville. Because one of my friends quite a while ago used to tease me that I was trying to create my own village. So we call it in Brock anvil.   Michael Hingson  10:59 There you go, that works. Nothing wrong with that. Well, so I know you're an author. And I know that you are an ASL interpreter, and so on, tell me how you got into being involved with ASL. And a little bit more about all that.   Kelly Brakenhoff  11:16 Sure. Um, I in high school, I volunteered at a camp for deaf kids. My parents wanted me to do something in the summer and stay out of trouble. So they kind of sent me to go volunteer. And at this camp. In the end, I didn't know any sign language. So I got a book. And I started trying to figure out a few signs before I first went to this camp. Of course, the first few weeks I was there, I had no idea what anyone was saying, because they were all using sign language. And I didn't know it. But by the end of the summer, I had learned quite a bit and I had made some really good friends. And I just kept learning during the school year, when they went when they were all gone. I kept taking classes and reading more books. And it actually turned out to be my, the language that I took when I was in college, it counted as my foreign language. And I just kept learning and hanging around with Deaf people. And eventually, my mentors in ASL, the deaf people that I was friends with, invited me to try interpreting for them. And I didn't, if I had known, I wasn't very good, but they were very kind. And they they asked me to interpret so I did and it just ended up kind of something I fell into. It wasn't something I intended to do. But it's become my whole life's work, and I really like it.   Michael Hingson  12:40 So is that kind of a full time job? Or are your vocation then?   Kelly Brakenhoff  12:43 Yeah, I would say it, it's my Well, it's hard to say what's my vocation because I also really love being an author, even though I haven't been published until recently. But I've been a writer my whole life in college, I actually majored in English. And I always wanted to be a writer, it just, I guess the interpreting thing just kind of was a very long detour. But I always wrote even when I was interpreting and so in raising my family and stuff, so once my kids started getting into high school and college, and I started looking around for something to fill some of my empty hours. That was when I really got serious about finishing my first book.   Michael Hingson  13:27 Well, from from an ASL standpoint, and interpreting it certainly is something that's, that's a little bit different. What have you learned about deafness and disabilities and so on from being involved in all of that,   Kelly Brakenhoff  13:41 oh, my goodness, we don't have enough there's not enough time in the day to talk about it's just changed my whole mindset, like, like, you've talked about that. I think it's just a way of looking at the world. Like a lot of people think that people who are deaf and hard of hearing, it's about your ears being broken, but it's really just a different way to move through life. So instead of a hearing world do like they have a visual world, so everything is visual. So it's like the opposite of what you experience now. So it's, it's just a way of moving through the world, you know that. And so instead of being like broken and something that needs to be fixed, it's just kind of a way of life. I guess. I just have a lot of respect. I've worked a lot in at the University of Nebraska. So I work with a lot of college students. And I've over the years done just Gosh, 20 Something different majors. I sit in on all the classes. I interpret what the teachers seen at the front of the class, and the discussions that the students do. And so I've gotten to learn a lot of things just by osmosis over the years and I have a really deep respect for the students because you know, their classmates sitting in the same room with them, they can listen to the lecture, write notes, you know, go online and do stuff all while this is all going on, whereas the deaf student has to sit there and watch me. If they want to take their own notes, they kind of have to look down and take their own notes, but then still keep an eye on me. And then if there's a PowerPoint, they're trying to watch that. And if there's a video, they're hoping that it has good captions, and so like, there's so many things going on, that it's amazing that they can get as much as they do out of the classes. And then of course, they have to study so much more afterwards, because a lot of times, they have to go back over the notes or back over the reading to see what they missed, because they were just, you know, a lot of their attention during the class is on me. So it's just given me a really healthy respect for how intelligent and how hard workers the students are. And I've just kind of seen that in all walks of life. I've interpreted for a lot of different situations, and different businesses and all kinds of things. And I just, I'm always in awe of how, how hard workers, the deaf students and just deaf adults in their job, or   Michael Hingson  16:13 how did the students then really get the job of notetaking done? Do they oftentimes have people who take notes for them? Or are they successful enough at taking notes themselves,   Kelly Brakenhoff  16:26 it really depends on the student and their preference. You know how some people don't mind having someone else take the notes, because then they can pay more attention to the interpreter and the PowerPoint and the teacher. But then other people maybe don't, you know, when you take notes, we could listen to the same speaker and your notes would be different than mine. And so some students don't really trust that another student is going to write down the same things that they would have written down if they were taking their own notes. So it really is a personal preference. But luckily, now, with the technology, I have a couple of students who, so they're deaf, and they use ASL and they use interpreters, but they also use cart, which is the captioning service. And so they'll have a laptop, or they also use like an otter, which is an app that the teacher wears a microphone and then it, it makes a transcript of everything that the teacher has said, and then they can save it. So I have a few students who even though they're, you know, pretty much dependent on the sign language for comprehension, they still use the transcript, because then they can go back later and like highlight the parts that they thought were important. And then it's kind of I think more in their control. Or if sometimes, like an English word has, you know, five different signs for it. And so if I do a sign, and they want to know what the exact English word was, they can look at the transcript and see oh, okay, that's the word that, you know, I need to remember or that's the word that I want to know. So I think it's great that they have all these tools. Because, gosh, back in the day, when I first started, none of that existed. And a lot of times, they would just have someone else take notes for them. And if that person wasn't a good note taker, they were kind of out of luck.   Michael Hingson  18:25 We use otter actually to do the transcribing of all of these podcasts. So that one unstoppable mindset is published. There's a written transcription as well. So we use otter to do that. And oftentimes, I will use otter to transcribe a meeting, or make it possible, make it possible for for people to come into the podcast, and listen and watch if you will in real time, which makes a lot of sense. So I found that otter works really well.   Kelly Brakenhoff  19:00 Yeah, I've tried several different apps and different services, because I have a thing to like you, I really want to make my website as accessible as possible, and my appearances as accessible as possible. So I get transcripts made of all the podcasts that I do whether the provider does or not. And so I've tried several different services, and I do agree that I think otter is a it produces a good product, and the price is good, too. So   Michael Hingson  19:33 I certainly right, you're right, the price is certainly right. But also, it does a good job and it's improving over time. Some people have said they're better systems than otter and I haven't really tried other services. And the people who help with the podcasts have looked at various things and we all end up settling on otter it really works well.   Kelly Brakenhoff  19:54 That's good to know. That's good to know, because a couple of years ago I tested several and I haven't read rechecked back into it. And the last six months, it's great. I think the one of the good benefits of the pandemic has been, how everyday people have realized that speech to text. And other, just things that we used to think of as being accessible for people with disabilities are now helpful for like everyone. And people have just come to realize that with all the Zoom meetings, and all of the the work from home solutions, so things that used to be just in the realm of special are now every day and they're all getting better, because we all demand that they get better. So the AI captions and everything are so much better than they were even just a few years ago.   Michael Hingson  20:47 Well, and then look at that you bring a very good point to light, which is that oftentimes, there are things that we use, that when other people start to use them first of all makes them much, much more affordable. But also, that will cause them to improve a lot more than otherwise they would have look at Dragon Naturally Speaking that started out as Dragon Dictate and did okay. And now Dragon is a lot better. I don't think that it transcribes as well as otter does in terms of plugging in punctuations, and so on. But I'm not surprised or wouldn't be surprised if that improves over time. But when you look at what otter does, it's pretty incredible.   Kelly Brakenhoff  21:31 It is it really is. And the What's incredible to me is the the short amount of time that it's gotten better. So I think that's great. But like you said, I think I guess it's sad to me that it takes it took a pandemic for enough people to use the tools that we've all been using for years to you know, demand a higher quality and a lower price. But I guess you know, if that's one good thing that comes out of all this, and that's great.   Michael Hingson  22:02 I think we tend to just get locked in to doing things one way and we, for whatever reason tend to be very slow at looking at other options. And you're right, the pandemic has made a significant difference and look at how many people are using zoom as opposed to pre pandemic, yet, Zoom has been there. The other thing that we've noticed along the way with Zoom is that they have deliberately and absolutely focused on accessibility and inclusion. So when a person who is blind encounters a problem with zoom in something is working right. There is a process to report that and we find that very quickly, it gets resolved, because they have a whole team working on issues to make sure that Zoom continues to be very inclusive.   Kelly Brakenhoff  22:55 Yes, I agree. Because I think when we first started with Zoom, the there was no, the only way you could have captions was hiring a person to do the captions. And then once they started making them automatic and everything that that was huge. That was that was huge. That's I'm glad to hear that they have a team doing it. And I agree, their improvements have have been amazing.   Michael Hingson  23:23 I don't want to put zoom on the spot, but have you compared otter with, if you compare it to otter with the zoom, automatic closed captioning,   Kelly Brakenhoff  23:31 um, I have, I guess if I just stop and think about it, I think they're pretty similar. What's actually kind of funny is when I will do a large meeting on Zoom, where I'm one of the interpreters. So I'm one of the little heads in the Brady Bunch group of people on Zoom. So I'll interpret for some of the deaf people in the meeting. And what I'll do sometimes is I'll turn on the captions because, you know, occasionally I might have a hard time hearing someone talking, or I might miss something or whatever. And so I can look at the captions and see if you know try to correct myself or, you know, check my accuracy. And yeah, so I have seen some pretty bad interpretations on our transcript on on Zoom and on otter, where things just don't come out. Right. It's, it's definitely for people who speak like standard slow American English once you have any kind of an accent or any kind of, if you speak too quickly, then the captions pretty much everywhere are a lot harder to understand. But they like I said, I still think they've gotten a lot better, which   Michael Hingson  24:48 I only asked that just out of curiosity because I know that the service is there to do automatic transcription or captioning. And I've never, never asked anyone exactly how well it does, except I've heard that it does a good job, but I've never compared it to like otter or something. And I bought otter for teens. And the reason I did that is so that it is now set up and integrated with Zoom. So it automatically starts when I opened a Zoom meeting. And what I do usually is unless there's a need to I will stop it. But it automatically starts when I come into a meeting that I that I initiate, and that's great, because then I don't even have to think about it. And it's a an effort of volition if I want to stop it.   Kelly Brakenhoff  25:42 Oh, yeah, that's great. I didn't realize you can set it up that way. That's awesome.   Michael Hingson  25:45 Yeah, the otter for teams. Home, I think, unless the price has changed, it was like $240 a year. And if you're a nonprofit, or whatever, it's half that. So it's not even a lot of money to do it, which is what's great.   Kelly Brakenhoff  26:00 That is That's awesome. Well, thank you. So the more users that use things, then the cheaper the price for everyone. And I think that's what we're seeing now with a lot of these tools.   Michael Hingson  26:12 It is ironic that we have to go through something like a pandemic to see things become more available, and for people to start to see that maybe some of the tools that say a person who is blind or low vision, or a person who is deaf or hard of hearing uses might very well be relevant for the rest of us. I'm still amazed that in driving with people using cell phones, we don't find more automatic use of the verbal technology voiceover for Apple and talkback on an Android, I'm surprised that we don't see more use of those verbal systems. In the driving experience, there's no reason not to do that, and do more to keep people's eyes on the road. Unfortunately, we're going the other way, we're getting more driving experiences with touchscreens, which means somebody's got to watch the screen, or look down and then quickly look back at the road. Why should that even have to happen today? Because we have such good voice technology. And we can also have good voice input technology to go along with it.   Kelly Brakenhoff  27:21 That's an excellent point. That's, that's so true. Yes, there's definitely you know, all the fancy touchscreens. But when I got my latest car, I had to sit in the driveway with the owner's manual for an hour just to figure out how to reprogram the clock. So you definitely don't want to be doing any of that while you're on the road. Well,   Michael Hingson  27:42 if you and I, I love Tesla's and I think that the technology is great, it is demonstrating the state of the art technology that's out there. But it's all controlled by a touchscreen, which means a blind passenger, I can't even do what a passenger would do to tune the radio or turn on a podcast or turn on whatever the services are available, much less anything else, because it's all touchscreen. And there's no reason for that today, we should be able to keep people's eyes more on the road. Even if you have the Tesla copilot function, which can take over a good part of the driving experience. It's not an autonomous vehicle software, but it can help with the driving experience. People should be keeping their eyes on the road not watching a touchscreen. And I'm still amazed that we're not seeing more people recognize the value of audio input and output.   Kelly Brakenhoff  28:36 I did not realize that I wrote in my first Tesla just a few months ago, and it was really neat, but I didn't I guess I just assumed that they had voice input things. I mean, wow, that's that's really shocking. as fancy as that whole system is that is very surprising. Well, let me let me rephrase that Ilan and say, hey,   Michael Hingson  28:59 well, let me rephrase it a little bit. There is availability of voice input for some things, but it's not an automatic process. So you have to invoke it, then you have to do something, I think to make it work every time you want to use it. What I'm saying is, it should be as much a part of the driving experience as anything else. And I'm saying it should be more part of the driving experience than using a touchscreen, it should be automatic. And we don't do that. We're too young to eyesight and we think that eyesight is the only game in town. Just like I'm sure that people who are deaf and hard of hearing would say that most people think that hearing is the only game in town. And in the in reality is neither is true. Exactly. I've said for years that I've said for years that people with disability, well, people who have eyesight, have their own disability and that is their light dependent. They can't do things without light Thomas Edison as the Americans with Disabilities Back would define it developed a reasonable accommodation for light dependent people when he created the light bulb. Let's get real, and I and I don't have the stitches. Lee it's true. You know, it's it's unfortunate that people are so locked into doing things one way that they're missing opportunities to make driving safer. But there you go.   Kelly Brakenhoff  30:22 I love that. I love that idea. I love that idea. I think that should be used to make that a thing as a political movement. I love that.   Michael Hingson  30:31 Yeah, well, we got to get Elon to go along with it.   Kelly Brakenhoff  30:34 Well, you know, he's kind of busy with Twitter right now. So maybe that all wrapped up, then he can he can focus his brain power on this?   Michael Hingson  30:43 Well, once he gets it set up, and if he's gonna do Twitter, then we'll start doing tweets. Oh, there you go. There you go. What a world we live in right now. So you said that you've done a lot of writing, you've been very much involved in writing, since college and so on. Why do you like writing so much?   Kelly Brakenhoff  31:07 Honestly, I don't know. I think it's just how I think how I process things. It's communication, talking to people talking to people like you. That's just kind of how I think it's just, just what I do is is who I am. That's a pretty simple answer.   Michael Hingson  31:26 We'll put Hey, it works. It works. So you said you just pretty recently got involved in starting to actually write books?   Kelly Brakenhoff  31:36 Yeah, I think it was 2014. I joined NaNoWriMo for the first time, which for people who haven't heard of that, it stands for National Novel Writing Month, and it's in November, where, gosh, by this day, by last year, I think it was around 750,000 people around the world, try to write 16 167 words a day for 30 days, and you come up with a 50,000 word manuscript by the end of the month. And that was signing up for that challenge was because I'm kind of competitive. So if I sign up for a challenge like that, I'm gonna do it. So that was like the thing that broke the barrier for me of just having ideas and just wanting to write and whatever and actually finishing a manuscript for the first time. That's what kind of gave me that push to actually do it.   Michael Hingson  32:33 So what did you publish your own books? Are they published through a publisher or what?   Kelly Brakenhoff  32:38 Yes, they are. They're self published, I tried for about a year to publish my firt, or to find an agent and all of that for my first one. And then at the same time, I was also checking into self publishing. And I don't know I think just a lot of factors kind of all converged. And I just decided at the end that self publishing was was the way to go. I'm kind of a control freak. And I like to, I like to have the my input into how to make you know, I hire my whole team. So I have an editor and a cover designer and and proofreaders and all of that stuff. And I get to decide what the finished product ends up to be. And it turns out that, yeah, I'm kind of bossy I guess.   Michael Hingson  33:23 You have a publicist who helps with the PR, and all that. I do.   Kelly Brakenhoff  33:27 I do. It's a it's called creative edge is the one that I use. And, and they've really, I've really enjoyed being part of that group.   Michael Hingson  33:37 I met Mickey a couple of months ago, actually, for the first time, he was introduced to me by someone else that we interviewed on the unstoppable mindset podcast. And she said, you know, he works with a lot of authors who might very well have interesting stories for you. And so that's how we met him. And we've actually started working with him as well. We're just getting started. But having written thunder dog, which was, and we're blessed by the fact that it was a number one New York Times bestseller, and then was published by Thomas Nelson part of HarperCollins. Now, but then we self published our second book, which was called running with Roselle, which was kind of more for youth, but more adults by it than then kids do. And it's the story of me growing up and Rozelle growing up. And then how we met after she became a guide dog in training, and she became my guide dog, and you know, kind of went from there, but I love writing, but I haven't done that much of it. We are starting to work on a third book, and that'll be a lot of fun. And we just got a book contract for that as well. So that's pretty exciting.   Kelly Brakenhoff  34:46 That's great. Congratulations. I didn't know that. That's awesome.   Michael Hingson  34:51 But But I'm curious. You've written I guess basically what two different kinds of books children's books and mysteries. How do you do mystery How do you come up with a plot? And how do you? Do you make it all come together? Because I think mystery writing has to be if you do it well, it has to be a real challenge to come up with a not only a plot, but create all of the scenes, do all the things that you need to do. And essentially, keep the solution hidden until the end of the book unless there's some value in presenting that earlier. And it's really how you get there.   Kelly Brakenhoff  35:30 Yeah, that's a funny question. Because I definitely write in extremes. I mean, I write 70,000, word mysteries, and then I write 500, word picture books for the children's books. So very different, very different approaches. But yeah, the mysteries and thrillers are kind of the things that I have always read my whole life. So I thought when I wanted to do that first NaNoWriMo challenge, I decided to kind of mash up all of my experiences. Like I said, I've lived in Hawaii and Nebraska, the East Coast, Seattle. So I kind of took all of those different elements working at a college and I put them all together into this murder mystery. And I got about two thirds of the way through and realized exactly what you said that writing a mystery is hard. It's actually one of I think, the most difficult genres to do because exactly for the reason you said, you want to make that mystery puzzle complicated enough that it can't be solved too early. Mystery readers are very smart people. And so it's very challenging coming up with enough suspects and clues to keep people guessing until the end. I guess I just love a challenge. I think it's it's fun, but it's also just what I love to read and write. So a read so it was kind of the most natural thing to write.   Michael Hingson  36:59 I think you just hit on it. Essentially. mysteries are puzzles and puzzles are as good as it gets. Who are your favorite mystery writers?   Kelly Brakenhoff  37:10 Oh, I have so many.   Michael Hingson  37:12 Yeah, me too. Yeah.   Kelly Brakenhoff  37:15 I think like my, you know, the ones I kind of grew up with was like Sue Grafton. So that letter A is for those Jana Ivanovic. There's Stephanie Plum Siri   Michael Hingson  37:27 plum. Hey, come on. We all love diesel, but that's another story.   Kelly Brakenhoff  37:30 Oh, yeah, diesel's awesome, too. Well, I'm sure being you live. You said you live in New Jersey, right? Oh, yes. Yeah. So you're very familiar with tenants. Definitely. Trenton definitely fun. And then I also just love like John Grisham and James Patterson and Michael Connelly. I mean, gosh, I just, that's all. I haven't really met very many mysteries that I didn't like.   Michael Hingson  37:54 Yeah. My my favorite still is Rex Stout with the neuro wolf series. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they I've never solved any of his books before the end. And I worked at it. I love Mary Higgins Clark. But I was able to basically figure out all of the, the mean people in that before the end of the book, still, they were fun to read   Kelly Brakenhoff  38:20 is fun, right? I mean, as long as it's a good story, even if guests are having an idea of did it by the end, as long as the character still keep you in it. And a lot of times this setting is kind of a character to then I don't mind, you know, reading to the end to confirm that I was right. I think what's funny since I became a writer, and I don't know, you can tell me if this is true for yourself. But since I became a writer, an author, I kind of ruined for reading, like I read a lot. But I read now to learn and to see what when I read a really good book, I love to pick it apart and and see why it's good. And not just the structure of it. But like if I if that paragraph was beautiful, I'll go back and read that paragraph several times and try to figure out what is so great about that paragraph, or when someone throws a twist or a turn in or I thought I knew who it was. And then at the end, I find out it was someone else. I just love that. That thrill of like, oh, you fooled me, you know, and I really like to think about all of that. But that means that a lot of times I'm not really enjoying the book. I'm like studying the book. And so I have found that if if I really get so sucked into a book that I am not doing that, that means that it's a really, really good book because if it took me out of my analysis into just enjoying it, then that's a me that's the mark of a very good book.   Michael Hingson  39:53 Sue Graf passed away from cancer did her last book ever get published? Because I don't think she finished it, did she?   Kelly Brakenhoff  39:59 It did not odds are one of those.   Michael Hingson  40:01 Zero Yeah,   Kelly Brakenhoff  40:03 yeah. The sad things. Is it never it's, it's not finished. I don't even know how far she got in it. But it wasn't finished enough to be published. Yeah,   Michael Hingson  40:12 yeah, I guess that's kind of what happened. But her mysteries were definitely some of the best. And we read them all. And some twice, which is always fun if I if I want to read a book a second time. And I don't have that many hours in the day that that's easy to do. But if I want to read a book a second time, then I know that there is something about it that I must have enjoyed. And we read here, a lot of books on audio, audible and other sources. The reason we do is that instead of watching TV, we pipe books through the house, my wife has learned to listen to audio. So we listen to books together. What I've been occasionally finding are editor mistakes where they said something and then later on referring back something, they say something different. Somebody messed up in editing it, and I don't see it often. But I do occasionally see it and I always find them. Which is a fun.   Kelly Brakenhoff  41:15 It is it's i It's funny, because, you know, even though my books are self published, I work really hard not to have those kinds of errors. Yeah, they go through an editor, at least one editor, numerous BETA readers, numerous proofreaders. And then, you know, six months after I published it all open it up, and I see a typo. And it's like, at first I used to get so frustrated at that. And then now I saw something one time on Facebook, it was like, cheers to you, you typo you made it through three rounds of editing, 10 proofreaders and you still made it you you go, you know,   Michael Hingson  41:58 I when I was in college, we used in freshman and sophomore physics, a series of books called the Berkeley physics series, because it came out of there. And I had a dorm mate, who looked in detail at every single book, looking for a mistake, because he said a lot of books, there are editing mistakes. And he said he finally found one in one of the Berkeley physics books, but he said it was so fun looking just to see any error. And he couldn't find them in the Berkeley physics series. It was just incredible that he spent that time. On the other hand, he was an excellent student. So I guess he learned from it as he was reading.   Kelly Brakenhoff  42:43 Have a niece who's a doctor and they actually some textbook company paid her. I don't know if she just got free books. Or if she actually got paid her last year of med school, they they paid her to go through the as she was going through the textbook to note down any errors that she found.   Michael Hingson  43:03 See, it's always good to to read as much as possible and proofread as much as possible. And you're right. There's nothing like a good editor to help.   Kelly Brakenhoff  43:12 Right, exactly, exactly.   Michael Hingson  43:14 So how hard was it to write your first mystery? Oh, must have a lot   Kelly Brakenhoff  43:22 of courage. And it was a lot of it was a lot of I think I must have gone through 10 or 15 jobs. It took me five years to finish it, it was ugly, there was a lot of tears. But you know, you just learned so much I kind of consider it like getting a master's degree. I just did it at home with my, my own process. But you know, I just had to learn a lot. You have to be humble, you have to be willing to accept criticism and advice from other people. But I feel like it taught me a lot. And of course, then the second book teaches you even more and the third and you know, each one you do, I think you just learn more, either about yourself or about writing. I'd love to read books about writing craft and how to do better. You know, I want every single book that I write to be better than the last. I think most authors are that way.   Michael Hingson  44:15 They get easier the more you write. That's a   Kelly Brakenhoff  44:18 funny question, because I'm right in the middle of writing my fourth mystery right now. And I've been stalled for quite a while. And what it's taught me is just about myself and my process and what I thought my process was versus what I'm finding. I thought I could speed it up, but it's actually making me slow down. So that means that I was not speeding it up correctly. If that makes sense.   Michael Hingson  44:46 Yeah. Well, and I don't know whether it becomes easier or not. I have been very blessed when we did thunder dog. I had someone to collaborate and help with it Susie Florrie And that happened because she actually found Me, because she was writing a book called Dawn tales, which was 17 stories about dogs who had stories. And she wanted to include Roselle in that. And she did. But as we discussed my story, she said, You should really write a book. And so we got started down that road. And I met her agent who became my agent, Chip McGregor on thunder dog. And we, we had a good time and collaborated well. And I think that there was a lot of value in that for me, because I know that I don't have the writing experience as such. But I know what's good when I read it. And I also know that I can add value. So we really had a very collaborative process of writing thunder dog, a lot of it is hers, and a lot of it is mine directly. And we blended the two which was great. Now with the third book that we're getting, which is getting ready to do, which is going to talk about fear and controlling fear and people learning that they can overcome fear and not let it blind them, if you will, to being able to make decisions. The working title is a guide dogs Guide to Being brave, and I'm doing that with a friend of Susie's Carrie, Carrie Wyatt can't. Because Suzy is in a Ph. D. program. Yeah, we love the title. We'll see what the publisher does. We've got a contract for it. We'll see what the publisher does with it over time. But so far everybody likes it. That was a carry creation, because I was going to call it blinded by fear, which was more accurate in some senses. But I think a guide dogs Guide to Being brave is a lot better title.   Kelly Brakenhoff  46:35 Yeah, it reminds me of that one. Is it the Art of Racing in the Rain? Yeah, yeah, it kind of reminds me of something like that, where it's it's a little off of what the theme of the book is, but it's still engaging, and it makes you want to know more about it.   Michael Hingson  46:54 It was a good book. And so   Kelly Brakenhoff  46:57 you said something that really resonated with me, you said, I know, it's good when I read it. And I think that's a big obstacle for beginning writers. And is that usually, if you're a writer, you're a reader first. And so I've read tons and tons of great books, and I know what great literature is, and I know what a great story is. And then when I write my first one, it's not very good. So you kind of have that, that huge gap between what you know is good and what you've produced. And so it's, it's, it's hard, you have to overcome that, that feeling of, of my stuff is really bad, you know, and then you have to work really hard to make it as good as, as you want it to be, you know, as good as it is to be able to actually share with the world, you know, to get up to that level of what your your bar is the bar that you've set. And so I think that's something that stands it's a barrier to a lot of people. And that's where I think a good editor comes. Yeah.   Michael Hingson  48:05 Yeah. Well look at John Grisham. You mentioned earlier the first book he wrote If I recall was a time to kill but it was the third one published the first one that he wrote, and it was published was the firm and then I'm trying to remember what the second one was. Was it the Pelican Brief the Pelican Brief right? And then A Time to Kill, which was the Jake Brigantes initiator, if you will. But if you look at all of them, you can see how the the books evolved over time in his writing style. So it's it is a natural progression. And I mentioned Rex Stout, a Nero Wolf, if you go back and read fair to Lance, which was his first book, and you compare it with especially much later writings, you can see changes, but you can see where everything is starting from and you get engaged in in fact, fair Lance was not the first mirror wolf book I read. by a longshot. It wasn't the first, but having gone back and read it. Even though everyone in the book all the characters developed a fair amount and since then, and his writing style improved. It was engaging. Mm hmm. Well, tell me about your mystery series,   Kelly Brakenhoff  49:26 sir. Um, it's about a college administrator named Cassandra Sato and she lives in Hawaii. She gives up her her life in Hawaii to move to Nebraska because she wants to accept her dream job at a tiny college called Morton college in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska. And she and her eventual goal is to become a college administrators or college president. So she thinks this is you know, the Path is gonna get her there. But of course, moving from Hawaii to Nebraska is a very, very large cultural, cultural shift. And so she encounters all kinds of problems, discrimination, barriers, everything. And a few months into her job, a student turns up dead on campus and see has to be part of the group of people who figures out what happened to the student and then find justice.   Michael Hingson  50:28 Yeah, come on. Cassandra really did. And she's been hiding a whole series. Yeah, that's   Kelly Brakenhoff  50:33 the end of the series. It was Cassandra.   Michael Hingson  50:35 That will come later on about the hundreds book, right. That's awesome. When Karen and my wife and I are talking about who did it in various books, we, we usually do things like that. We've been reading a lot of the JE NACHA as well, we read a chance to but the JD Robb books, the in depth series, have you read those. And so I read very many of those now, we we oftentimes will spin a story how Eve Dallas really did it. Or Roark did it and had just a lot of fun with it. But again, a great series of books is there's a lot of sex in those books, but they're still taking Ross. Yeah, they're great mysteries.   Kelly Brakenhoff  51:20 Yeah, a lot of times people like the ones that I write well, obviously, I have four kids and grandkids. And my kids would cringe if I if they had to read a sex scene that I wrote. So, you know, my kids were like, high school and college age when I started writing. So I decided all the sex in my books, there's gonna be behind closed doors, and yeah, nobody, nobody wants to have their mom. Yeah, no.   Michael Hingson  51:46 I've, I've talked to several authors who say that who, one who said I would never any more, I would never let my daughter or my wife, wife read the books, or I changed the sex so that they could read them. But the value of having them read them as they're great critics, and so it's worthwhile. But yeah, it is fun to to see how people react. But, you know, a mystery. Doesn't need to have all the violence thrown at you right out in the open, which is why puzzles are so great. At James Patterson tends to be a little bit more violent, but not nearly as violent as he could be. So we we've always enjoyed Of course, the Alex Cross series.   Kelly Brakenhoff  52:33 Yeah, it's there's such a huge variety in Yeah, the violence level and all that stuff. I myself, I have a pretty vivid imagination. I don't really need people to spell some of that stuff out for me. My mysteries are technically like cozy mysteries, which kind of means that there's no like blood on the page. There's no swearing, there's no sex. So like, even you know, high school kids can read them and, and that kind of thing. So I guess that's just, I just write what I like. So that's only because I like to read. So that's what I like to write.   Michael Hingson  53:12 Come on. That's only because Cassandra is trying to hide everything, but we know the truth.   Kelly Brakenhoff  53:18 That's right. She's really Voldemort.   Michael Hingson  53:21 Yeah, she's really Voldemort. Speaking of another good series of books   Kelly Brakenhoff  53:28 that's that's a whole different ballgame.   Michael Hingson  53:30 But but you know, looking at the Harry Potter books, again is another one where going from Book One through Book Seven, just how it evolved. And they're so fun.   Kelly Brakenhoff  53:42 They are they're definitely one of my I, I like all genres. So yeah, I loved Harry Potter Lord of the Rings, Narnia. I mean, you name it, it's I thought during the pandemic that I would just read all day every day but it turns out I actually have to do other stuff too.   Michael Hingson  53:59 So I hate it when that happens.   Kelly Brakenhoff  54:02 There is no laundry fairy I hate to be the person to tell you this but there is no laundry fairy,   Michael Hingson  54:07 I haven't found one either. And I get to do the clothes washing at our house which is fine. So for me, I love the brainless activities on Sunday. So there are three tasks that well for that I do on Sundays. It starts with doing the laundry or starting the laundry. Another is we I take the cat box out we use a litter called litter one it's not sand, it's all pine kernels. And you buy them and they come in a disposable box. So we just use in different new box every week. And it's about the same as using regular sand that you buy in the in the store. But at the end of the week, you just throw the whole box out and put a new one up and the cat is very demanding when it comes time to change the box. So that happens on Sunday. I take the trash out on Sunday. And then we have a little If we do get housecleaning help during the week, Karen's in wheelchairs, he has been in a chair her whole life. So it's kind of hard for us to do some of those things. So we do have a housekeeper that comes on Thursdays, in fact, and today's Thursday. So Jeanette is here, but we have a robot vacuum and I do the vacuuming again on Sunday with the robot in our bedroom, because that's also where Alamo my guide dog sleeps. So we get all those. So those are my four tasks on Sunday. And they're they're all pretty brainless in a sense. So I can read while they're going on, which is fun. And Karen is a quilter. So she's usually in sewing. And and she's reading the same thing I read. So it's a question right now, who finishes which JD Robb book first?   Kelly Brakenhoff  55:44 Yeah, that is definitely the the good thing about audiobooks is being able to multitask on some of those things that you don't have to pay so much attention to.   Michael Hingson  55:54 Tell me about your dupe the deaf dog ASL series.   Kelly Brakenhoff  55:58 Well, that is the second series that I started after I finished the mystery novels, I kind of had a moment where I realized that I, you know, I started my own publishing company. And I just had a thought, I mean, it's kind of cliche, it was actually a dream that just came to me of like, what I could do with this publishing company, if I just kind of unleashed it. And so I came up with the idea of, of this orange, English spaniel dog who is deaf and all of the people in his or all of his family can hear. And so it's just about different experiences that he has as the only person in a family of hearing people, and trying to get deaf and hard of hearing children to see themselves and their everyday life experiences on our pages of our books. But I also want kids who can hear to understand what it's like to hear differently. We just finished the third book, and I'm actually actually we just finished the fourth book, the third book just came out. But the fourth book is in production right now. And I had no idea when it started, what it was going to end up being but it's actually turned out to be more successful. And I would say even more fun than my mysteries, the mysteries are kind of like my thing that I enjoy. As far as, like you said, creating the puzzle and, and the challenge of it, but the Duke, the deaf dog ASL series, is kind of what I feel like I'm taking my 30 Whatever years of interpreting and hanging around with really cool Deaf people, and then like sharing that with the world.   Michael Hingson  57:49 So it's not a mystery series.   Kelly Brakenhoff  57:53 No, it is not. They are picture books. So they're only like less than 500 words. And each one is a different situation that do gets into so there's like a different message. And each one more than 90% of children who are born deaf or hard of hearing have parents that can hear I did a lot of research to before I started the books, and there's very few books for young children that have deaf and hard of hearing characters. Once you get into like high school age, or even beyond, there's more books that have deaf and hard of hearing characters. But at the kindergarten, first grade age, there's very few books. And you know, my kids had lots and lots of choices of books to read. So I feel like deaf kids did have lots and lots of choices, books that have characters like them in there. So each book has a different message like the first one was called nevermind. And the message is that everyone deserves to be included in conversations. I mean, how many times do we tell people nevermind when they ask us to repeat ourselves? Or maybe we have, like a older parent or spouse who doesn't hear well, or even like someone who's just a little bit slower to act, or to understand a lot of times we just get impatient and say forget it. I'll explain later. And this book like after I published that first book, I've had so many deaf people come up to me and tell me stories of times when they've been told nevermind. And they thanked me for sharing their stories because they want hearing people to understand how hurtful those words are and what it feels to be left out. So I have a pretty long list of situations I've seen throughout the years that I plan to incorporate into the books and I I'm only stopped by my amount of time and and money to hire illustrators at this point.   Michael Hingson  59:55 Back to mysteries. Of course there's the cat who series Lily and Jackson Brown and also Rita Mae Brown and sneaky pie Brown. But in thinking of the cat who books, why not have a Duke, the Duke, the deaf dog series, solving mysteries, and also deal with all the frustrations that Duke has of trying to get his humans to listen? And how he has to figure things out, not being in a hearing world himself.   Kelly Brakenhoff  1:00:27 Yeah, that's a good thought. I'm actually like I said, I have so many ideas that it's really limited by my time and money, but um, the picture books are more like so Duke's a dog. Right? It's more like he's like a pitbull, like, they stand on their hind legs. And they kind of like even his dad wears like a tie. So they kind of are like human, but they're dogs. But it's a nice way to be able to show diversity and like breeds of dogs and colors of dogs and abilities and body types and stuff without actually having like different children in there. So it's kind of like, like, I don't know, if you remember the Mercer Mayer series, little critter. That's kind of what I thought of, as I   Michael Hingson  1:01:13 was able to read them. Yeah,   Kelly Brakenhoff  1:01:15 that was like my, my model, I guess of who I thought of it's like, so Duke is more just like a character, a fictional character. But I do have a couple of other ideas for series for like middle grade age kids. And those would be mysteries, and those would use some characters. I have a couple of young characters in the Cassandra Sacco series. I did a Halloween short story last year called scavenger hunt. And that two of the main characters in there were 10 year old kids. And so I think I want to do a separate series with them and have those be mysteries because I agree, I think I can incorporate a lot of the things that I know about the Deaf community and Deaf culture and ASL into a mystery, and they get kind of fun that way. And   Michael Hingson  1:02:05 it's great that you're using this opportunity to teach people more about deaf and hard of hearing. And not only as a culture, but as just as much an included an inclusive part of society as everyone else. I am concerned when you're talking about do looking like a character and looking a little bit like people. I just don't want to see a new book coming out about do the deaf dog ASL series goes to Animal Farm just saying. But Duly noted. So So you you did one of your books. As a Kickstarter campaign?   Kelly Brakenhoff  1:02:43 We did. Um, the the most recent one that just published in January, I did my first Kickstarter campaign.   Michael Hingson  1:02:51 Now why did you do that? What brought Kickstarter into it.   Kelly Brakenhoff  1:02:54 I went to this conference last fall in Las Vegas, and I met some authors who publish their books first on Kickstarter, before they release them more widely and other stores. And listening to them made me realize that Kickstarter might be a good way for me to reach new readers. The nice thing about Kickstarter, which I think you said that you've supported a couple of campaigns, honestly, before I had gone to this conference, I did not think starter was something I needed to do, I hadn't really gone on there, I hadn't pledged sponsored anybody else's project. So I just kind of went into it blindly. But I realized that the cool thing about Kickstarter is you get to develop a direct relationship with people who want to buy your product. So in my case, it's a book, but I've gone on there. And since then, I've supported all kinds of different projects. I've done a board game, and a coloring book and a purse. And I mean, there's so many neat, creative ideas that people come up with and put them on Kickstarter, just to see. So then the the customers can come on and pledge money towards that product and say, Yes, I think that's a great idea. The world needs that. And I'm willing to plunk down my money to pre order that thing that you want to make. And so if enough of those people say that they'll pre order the product, then the project is successful, and it funds and then the person who listed the project goes ahead and makes it. So that's been really exciting. But you have this direct relationship where the creator is sending you messages and keeping you updated on the progress like, okay, you know, we're finished in publishing, you know, in the case of publishing, you say, Okay, we finished the illustration and we're waiting for them to be printed and then I actually personally boxed everything up and mailed them to the people with personal note and some extra stickers and everything. So I think I'd really enjoy that contact with people and that communication because it goes both ways, then people can actually respond to me. If I just sell stuff on Amazon or in the local bookstore, I don't really know who buys my, my books. And so the Kickstarter has been a really cool way to just kind of, I guess, learn more about what people want and what people like about them. And it's kind of a neat way to have this direct relationship. It made me I funded my first project successfully, we raised $2,500, which was enough money to buy some hardcover books. In the past, I haven't been able to afford doing those books, as a small publishers. So it's great to be able to order those books and get those into people's hands they came with, they're very well done on nice thick paper with really vivid color illustrations. And then there's photos on each page of different ASL signs. And the photos are really clear. So it was definitely worth I guess, the experience. So I'm actually going to be doing another one in July for the, for the next Duke book. But as a person, like you said, you you have a contract to do your next book. And so you get a lot of times authors will get paid in advance, this is kind of almost the same thing where I'm making this idea. And then I'm, like pre paying some of the costs that it cost to produce the book, like, you know, the illustrating, or the printing, or all the different things that are associated with making the book, it's like a way for me to almost get like an advance except this directly coming from the customers instead of from the publishing company.   Michael Hingso

Find the full transcript at  https://enbooo.com/.  Here are the five expressions you'll learn how to use in this episode: guilt trip, guilty by association, weigh on someone's conscience, come clean, feel bad Listen to the story and discover how YOU can use them!Support the show

Sign up for our Patreon for bonuses and more! www.themidnightrainpodcast.com    Do you happen to swear? Is it something you happen to do when you stub your pinky toe on the coffee table? What about when you've just finished dinner and you pull that glorious lasagna out of the oven, burn yourself and then drop your Italian masterpiece on the floor, in turn burning yourself once again? Odds are that if you're listening to this show, you have a rather colorful vernacular and aren't offended by those that share in your “darker” linguistic abilities. Those dramatic and often harsh, yet exceedingly hilarious words, have a pretty amazing history. Were they written in manuscripts by monks? Or, did we find them used by regular people and found in prose like the names of places, personal names, and animal names? Well, could they tell us more about our medieval past other than just that sex, torture, plagues and incest was all the rage? Let's find out!   Fuck   Let's start with our favorite word. Let's all say it together, kids. “Fuck!” This most versatile yet often considered one of the worst of the “bad words” doesn't seem to have been around in the English language prior to the fifteenth century and may have arrived later from the German or th Dutch. Leave it to those beautiful Germans to introduce us to such a colorful word. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary says it wasn't actually used until 1500. However, the name of a specific place may have been used even earlier.   Many early instances of fuck were said to actually have been used to mean “to strike” rather than being anything to do with fornicating. The more common Middle English word for sex was ”swive”, which has developed into the Modern English word swivel, as in: go swivel on it. Some of the earliest instances of fuck, seen to mean “hitting” or “striking,” such as Simon Fuckebotere (from in 1290), who was more than likely in the milk industry, hitting butter, or Henry Fuckebeggar (1286/7) who may have, hit the poor.   The earliest examples of the word fuck in the English language appeared in the names of places. The first of these is said to be found near Sherwood in 1287: Ric Wyndfuk and Ric Wyndfuck de Wodehous. These both feature a kestrel known as the Windfucker which, we must assume, went in the wind. The next definite example comes from Bristol 1373 in Fockynggroue, which may have been named for a grove where couples went for “some quiet alone time.”   However, Somewhere among the indictment rolls of the county court of Chester (1310/11), studied by Dr. Paul Booth of Keele University (Staffordshire), a man whose Christian name was Roger is mentioned three times. His less Christian last name is also recorded. The name being mentioned repetitively pretty much means it did not result from a spelling mistake but rather it's the real thing. Meaning, the man's full name was Roger Fuckebythenavele. Not only does his second name move back the earliest use of fuck in its modern sense by quite a few decades; it also verifies that it is, in fact, a Middle English word. But of course, there are those fuckers that will undoubtedly debate it's fucking origin.   The stem *fukkō-, with its characteristic double consonant, is easy to explain as a Germanic iterative verb – one of a large family of similar forms. They originated as combinations of various Indo-European roots with *-nah₂-, a suffix indicating repeated action. The formation is not, strictly speaking, Proto-Indo-European; the suffix owes its existence to the reanalysis of an older morphological structure (reanalysis happens when people fail to analyze an inherited structure in the same way as their predecessors). Still, verbs of this kind are older than Proto-Germanic.   *fukkō- apparently meant to ‘strike repeatedly, beat' (like, say, “dashing” the cream with a plunger in a traditional butter churn). Note also windfucker and fuckwind – old, obsolete words for ‘kestrel'.   A number of words in other Germanic languages may also be related to fuck. One of them is Old Icelandic fjúka ‘to be tossed or driven by the wind' < *feuka-; cf. also fjúk ‘drifting snowstorm' (or, as one might put it in present-day English, a fucking blizzard). These words fit a recurrent morphological pattern observed by Kroonen (2012): Germanic iteratives with a voiceless geminate produced by Kluge's Law often give rise to “de-iterativised” verbs in which the double stop is simplified if the full vocalism or the root (here, *eu rather than *u) is restored. Kluge's law had a noticeable effect on Proto-Germanic morphology. Because of its dependence on ablaut and accent, it operated in some parts of declension and conjugation, but not in others, giving rise to alternations of short and long consonants in both nominal and verbal paradigms.   If the verb is really native (“Anglo-Saxon”), one would expect Old English *fuccian (3sg. *fuccaþ, pl. *fucciaþ, 1/3sg. preterite *fuccode, etc.). If these forms already had “impolite” connotations in Old English, their absence from the Old English literary corpus is understandable. We may be absolutely sure that *feortan (1/3 sg. pret. *feart, pret. pl. *furton, p.p. *forten) existed in Old English, since fart exists today (attested since about 1300, just like the word fuck) and has an impeccable Indo-European etymology, with cognates in several branches. Still, not a single one of these reconstructed Old English verb forms is actually documented (all we have is the scantily attested verbal noun feorting ‘fart(ing)').   One has to remember that written records give us a strongly distorted picture of how people really spoke in the past. If you look at the frequency of fuck, fucking and fucker in written English over the last 200 years, you may get the impression that these words disappeared from English completely ca. 1820 and magically reappeared 140 years later. Even the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary pretended they didn't exist. The volume that should have contained FUCK was published in 1900, and Queen Victoria was still alive.   According to the Oxford English Dictionary: Forms:  α. 1500s fucke, 1500s– fuck; also Scottish pre-1700 fuk.   Frequency (in current use):  Show frequency band information Origin: Probably a word inherited from Germanic. Etymology: Probably cognate with Dutch fokken …   In coarse slang. In these senses typically, esp. in early use, with a man as the subject of the verb. Thesaurus » Categories » intransitive. To have sexual intercourse. ▸ ?a1513   W. Dunbar Poems (1998) I. 106   Be his feirris he wald haue fukkit.   transitive. To have sexual intercourse with (a person). In quot. a1500   in Latin-English macaronic verse; the last four words are enciphered by replacing each letter with the following letter of the alphabet, and fuccant has a Latin third-person plural ending. The passage translates as ‘They [sc. monks] are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of Ely.' [a1500   Flen, Flyys (Harl. 3362) f. 47, in T. Wright & J. O. Halliwell Reliquiæ Antiquæ (1841) I. 91   Non sunt in cœli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk [= fuccant uuiuys of heli].]   transitive. With an orifice, part of the body, or something inanimate as an object. Also occasionally intransitive with prepositional objects of this type. [1680   School of Venus ii. 99   An hour after, he Ferked my Arse again in the same manner.]   transitive. To damage, ruin, spoil, botch; to destroy, put an end to; = to fuck up 1a at Phrasal verbs 1. Also (chiefly in passive): to put into a difficult or hopeless situation; to ‘do for'. Cf. also mind-fuck v. 1776   Frisky Songster (new ed.) 36   O, says the breeches, I shall be duck'd, Aye, says the petticoat, I shall be f—d.   transitive. U.S. To cheat; to deceive, betray. Frequently without. 1866   G. Washington Affidavit 20 Oct. in I. Berlin et al. Black Mil. Experience in Civil War (1982) v. xviii. 792   Mr. Baker replied that deponent would be fucked out of his money by Mr. Brown.   transitive. In oaths and imprecations (chiefly in optative with no subject expressed): expressing annoyance, hatred, dismissal, etc. Cf. damn v. 6, bugger v. 2a. See also fuck it at Phrases 2, fuck you at Phrases 1b. 1922   J. Joyce Ulysses ii. xv. [Circe] 560   God fuck old Bennett!   Phrases   Imprecatory and exclamatory phrases (typically in imperative or optative with no subject expressed sense).  P1. Expressing hostility, contempt, or defiant indifference. Categories » go fuck yourself and variants. 1895   Rep. Senate Comm. Police Dept. N.Y. III. 3158   By Senator Bradley: Q. Repeat what he said to you? A. He said, ‘Go on, fuck yourself, you son-of-a-bitch; I will give you a hundred dollars'; he tried to punch me, and I went out.   fuck you. 1905   L. Schindler Testimony 20 Dec. in People State of N.Y. Respondent, against Charles McKenna (1907) (N.Y. Supreme Court) 37   Murray said to me, ‘Fuck you, I will give you more the same.' And as he said that, I grabbed the two of them.   P2. fuck it: expressing dismissal, exasperation, resignation, or impetuousness. 1922   E. E. Cummings Enormous Room iv. 64   I said, ‘F— it, I don't want it.'   P3. fuck me and elaborated variants: expressing astonishment or exasperation. 1929   F. Manning Middle Parts of Fortune II. xi. 229   ‘Well, you can fuck me!' exclaimed the astonished Martlow. Cunt Cunt is a vulgar word for the vulva or vagina. It is used in a variety of ways, including as a term of disparagement. Reflecting national variations, cunt can be used as a disparaging and obscene term for a woman in the United States, an unpleasant or stupid man or woman in the United Kingdom, or a contemptible man in Australia and New Zealand. However, in Australia and New Zealand it can also be a neutral or positive term when used with a positive qualifier (e.g., "He's a good cunt"). The term has various derivative senses, including adjective and verb uses.   Feminist writer and English professor Germaine Greer argues that cunt "is one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock". The earliest known use of the word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was as part of a placename of a London street, Gropecunt Lane. Use of the word as a term of abuse is relatively recent, dating from the late nineteenth century. The word appears not to have been taboo in the Middle Ages, but became that way toward the end of the eighteenth century, and was then not generally not allowed to be printed until the latter part of the twentieth century.   There is some disagreement on the origin of the term cunt, although most sources agree that it came from the Germanic word (Proto-Germanic *kunto, stem *kunton-), which emerged as kunta in Old Norse. The Proto-Germanic form's actual origin is a matter of debate among scholars. Most Germanic languages have cognates, including Swedish, Faroese, and Nynorsk (kunta), West Frisian, and Middle Low German (kunte), Middle Dutch (conte), Dutch kut (cunt), and Dutch kont (butt), Middle Low German kutte, Middle High German kotze ("prostitute"), German kott, and maybe Old English cot. The Proto-Germanic term's etymology ia questionable.   It may have arisen by Grimm's law operating on the Proto-Indo-European root *gen/gon "create, become" seen in gonads, genital, gamete, genetics, gene, or the Proto-Indo-European root guneh or "woman" (Greek: gunê, seen in gynaecology). Relationships to similar-sounding words such as the Latin cunnus ("vulva"), and its derivatives French con, Spanish coño, and Portuguese cona, or in Persian kos (کُس), have not been conclusively demonstrated. Other Latin words related to cunnus are cuneus ("wedge") and its derivative cunēre ("to fasten with a wedge", (figurative) "to squeeze in"), leading to English words such as cuneiform ("wedge-shaped"). In Middle English, cunt appeared with many spellings, such as coynte, cunte and queynte, which did not always reflect the actual pronunciation of the word.   The word, in its modern meaning, is attested in Middle English. Proverbs of Hendyng, a manuscript from some time before 1325, includes the advice:   (Give your cunt wisely and make [your] demands after the wedding.) from wikipedia. The word cunt is generally regarded in English-speaking countries as unsuitable for normal publicconversations. It has been described as "the most heavily tabooed word of all English words".   Quoted from wikipedia: Some American feminists of the 1970s sought to eliminate disparaging terms for women, including "bitch" and "cunt". In the context of pornography, Catharine MacKinnon argued that use of the word acts to reinforce a dehumanisation of women by reducing them to mere body parts; and in 1979 Andrea Dworkin described the word as reducing women to "the one essential – 'cunt: our essence ... our offence'".   While “vagina” is used much more commonly in colloquial speech to refer to the genitals of people with vulvas than “cunt” is, its  origins are defined by its service to male sexuality, making “cunt” —  interestingly enough — the least historically misogynistic of the two. “Cunt” has also been used in Renaissance bawdy verse and in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, but it was not until Shakespeare's era that its meaning began to fundamentally shift, during the dawn of Christian doctrine.   Arguably, if cunt simply means and refers to “vagina”, then why would that be bad? Vaginas are pretty great! They provide people with pleasure, they give life, and they're even a naturally developed lunar calendar! So, why would a person refer to another, assumedly pissy person as a vagina?    So, should we as society fight the negative stereotypes and embrace the term cunt again? It's a tiny word that bears a lot of weight, but it should be anything but scary or offensive. It can be a massive dose of love instead of an enormous force of hate if we actively define our vocabulary rather than letting it define us.   Words only have that type of power when the uptight, vanilla flavored, missionary only Karen's and Kevin's of the world decide they don't like them. This has been going on for as long as we've been using words. So, let's take it back. We love you, ya cunts!   coarse slang in later use. Thesaurus » Categories » The female genitals; the vulva or vagina. Cf. quaint n.1 a1400   tr. Lanfranc Sci. Cirurgie (Ashm.) (1894) 172   In wymmen þe necke of þe bladdre is schort, & is maad fast to the cunte. 1552   D. Lindsay Satyre Procl. 144   First lat me lok thy cunt, Syne lat me keip the key. 1680   Earl of Rochester et al. Poems 77   I fear you have with interest repaid, Those eager thrusts, which at your Cunt he made. 1865   ‘Philocomus' Love Feast iii. 21   I faint! I die! I spend! My cunt is sick! Suck me and fuck me!   A woman as a source of sexual gratification; a promiscuous woman; a slut. Also as a general term of abuse for a woman. 1663   S. Pepys Diary 1 July (1971) IV. 209   Mr. Batten..acting all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined, and..saying that the he hath to sell such a pouder as should make all the cunts in town run after him.   As a term of abuse for a man. 1860   in M. E. Neely Abraham Lincoln Encycl. (1982) 154   And when they got to Charleston, they had to, as is wont Look around to find a chairman, and so they took a Cunt   A despised, unpleasant, or annoying place, thing, or task. 1922   J. Joyce Ulysses ii. iv. [Calypso] 59   The grey sunken cunt of the world.   Bitch   Women were frequently equated to dogs in Ancient Greek literature, which was used to dehumanize and shame them for their alleged lack of restraint and sexual urges. This is believed to have originated from the hunter goddess Artemis, who was frequently depicted as a pack of hounds and was perceived to be both beautiful and frigid and savage. According to popular belief, the term "bitch" as we use it today evolved from the Old English word "bicce," which meant a female dog, about the year 1000 AD. The phrase started out as a critique of a woman's sexuality in the 15th century but eventually evolved to signify that the lady was rude or disagreeable.   Clare Bayley has connected this growth of the term "bitch" as an insult to the suffrage struggle and the final passage of women's suffrage in the early 20th century, particularly the 1920s. Men were intimidated when women started to challenge their subordinate roles in the patriarchal power structure, and the phrase started to be used to ferocious and irate females. Men's respect for women and the prevalence of the term are clearly correlated, since usage of the term rapidly decreased during World War II as men's appreciation of women's contributions to the war effort increased.   However, as they competed with women for employment after the war ended and the men went back to work, the word's usage increased once more. As the housewife paradigm started to fade away during the war, the position of women in the workplace and society as a whole underwent an irreparable change. However, males perceived the presence of women in the workforce as a challenge to their supremacy in society.   With songs like Elton John's "The Bitch is Back" ascending the charts in 1974, the slur became more common in mainstream culture and music in the latter decades of the 20th century. As a result of artists like Kanye West and Eminem using the term "bitch" to denigrate women and depict violence against them in their lyrics, hip-hop culture has also long been accused of being misogynistic.   We just need to look at Hillary Clinton's recent campaign for president in 2016 to understand how frequently this slur is leveled at women, especially those in positions of authority who are defying patriarchal expectations and shattering glass ceilings. Rep. AOC being called a "fucking bitch" by a GOP Rep. is another similar example. It is evident that the usage of the phrase and the degree to which males regard women to be a danger are related.   bitch (v.)   "to complain," attested from at least 1930, perhaps from the sense in bitchy, perhaps influenced by the verb meaning "to bungle, spoil," which is recorded from 1823. But bitched in this sense seems to echo Middle English bicched "cursed, bad," a general term of opprobrium (as in Chaucer's bicched bones "unlucky dice"), which despite the hesitation of OED, seems to be a derivative of bitch (n.).   bitchy (adj.) 1925, U.S. slang, "sexually provocative;" later (1930s) "spiteful, catty, bad-tempered" (usually of females); from bitch + -y (2). Earlier in reference to male dogs thought to look less rough or coarse than usual. The earliest use of "bitch" specifically as a derogatory term for women dates to the fifteenth century. Its earliest slang meaning mainly referred to sexual behavior, according to the English language historian Geoffrey Hughes:   The early applications were to a promiscuous or sensual woman, a metaphorical extension of the behavior of a bitch in heat. Herein lies the original point of the powerful insult son of a bitch, found as biche sone ca. 1330 in Arthur and Merlin ... while in a spirited exchange in the Chester Play (ca. 1400) a character demands: "Whom callest thou queine, skabde bitch?" ("Who are you calling a whore, you miserable bitch?").   In modern usage, the slang term bitch has different meanings depending largely on social context and may vary from very offensive to endearing, and as with many slang terms, its meaning and nuances can vary depending on the region in which it is used.   The term bitch can refer to a person or thing that is very difficult, as in "Life's a bitch" or "He sure got the bitch end of that deal". It is common for insults to lose intensity as their meaning broadens ("bastard" is another example). In the film The Women (1939), Joan Crawford could only allude to the word: "And by the way, there's a name for you ladies, but it isn't used in high society - outside of a kennel." At the time, use of the actual word would have been censored by the Hays Office. By 1974, Elton John had a hit single (#4 in the U.S. and #14 in the U.K.) with "The Bitch Is Back", in which he says "bitch" repeatedly. It was, however, censored by some radio stations. On late night U.S. television, the character Emily Litella (1976-1978) on Saturday Night Live (portrayed by Gilda Radner) would frequently refer to Jane Curtin under her breath at the end of their Weekend Update routine in this way: "Oh! Never mind...! Bitch!"   Bitchin' arose in the 1950s to describe something found to be cool or rad. Modern use can include self-description, often as an unfairly difficult person. For example, in the New York Times bestseller The Bitch in the House, a woman describes her marriage: "I'm fine all day at work, but as soon as I get home, I'm a horror....I'm the bitch in the house."Boy George admitted "I was being a bitch" in a falling out with Elton John. Generally, the term bitch is still considered offensive, and not accepted in formal situations. According to linguist Deborah Tannen, "Bitch is the most contemptible thing you can say about a woman. Save perhaps the four-letter C word." It's common for the word to be censored on Prime time TV, often rendered as "the b-word". During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, a John McCain supporter referred to Hillary Clinton by asking, "How do we beat the bitch?" The event was reported in censored format:   On CNN's "The Situation Room," Washington Post media critic and CNN "Reliable Sources" host Howard Kurtz observed that "Senator McCain did not embrace the 'b' word that this woman in the audience used." ABC reporter Kate Snow adopted the same location. On CNN's "Out in the Open," Rick Sanchez characterized the word without using it by saying, "Last night, we showed you a clip of one of his supporters calling Hillary Clinton the b-word that rhymes with witch." A local Fox 25 news reporter made the same move when he rhymed the unspoken word with rich.   A study reported that, when used on social media, bitch "aims to promote traditional, cultural beliefs about femininity". Used hundreds of thousands of times per day on such platforms, it is associated with sexist harassment, "victimizing targets", and "shaming" victims who do not abide by degrading notions about femininity   Son of a bitch The first known appearance of "son-of-a-bitch" in a work of American fiction is Seventy-Six (1823), a historical fiction novel set during the American Revolutionary War by eccentric writer and critic John Neal.  The protagonist, Jonathan Oadley, recounts a battle scene in which he is mounted on a horse: "I wheeled, made a dead set at the son-of-a-bitch in my rear, unhorsed him, and actually broke through the line." The term's use as an insult is as old as that of bitch. Euphemistic terms are often substituted, such as gun in the phrase "son of a gun" as opposed to "son of a bitch", or "s.o.b." for the same phrase. Like bitch, the severity of the insult has diminished. Roy Blount Jr. in 2008 extolled the virtues of "son of a bitch" (particularly in comparison to "asshole") in common speech and deed. Son of a bitch can also be used as a "how about that" reaction, or as a reaction to excruciating pain. In politics the phrase "Yes, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch" has been attributed, probably apocryphally, to various U.S. presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon. Immediately after the detonation of the first atomic bomb in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July 1945 (the device codenamed Gadget), the Manhattan Project scientist who served as the director of the test, Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge, exclaimed to Robert Oppenheimer "Now we're all sons-of-bitches." In January 2022, United States President Joe Biden was recorded on a hot mic responding to Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy asking, "Do you think inflation is a political liability ahead of the midterms?" Biden responded sarcastically, saying, "It's a great asset — more inflation. What a stupid son of a bitch." The 19th-century British racehorse Filho da Puta took its name from "Son of a Bitch" in Portuguese. The Curtiss SB2C, a World War 2 U.S. Navy dive bomber, was called "Son-of-a-Bitch 2nd Class" by some of its pilots and crewmen. In American popular culture, the slang word "basic" is used to derogatorily refer to persons who are thought to favor mainstream goods, fashions, and music. Hip-hop culture gave rise to "basic bitch," which gained popularity through rap music, lyrics, blogs, and videos from 2011 to 2014. "Bros" is a common word for their male counterparts. Other English-speaking nations have terms like "basic bitch" or "airhead," such as modern British "Essex girls" and "Sloane Rangers," as well as Australian "haul girls," who are noted for their love of shopping for expensive clothing and uploading films of their purchases on YouTube. Oxford English Dictionary  transitive. To call (a person, esp. a woman) a bitch. 1707   Diverting Muse 131   Why how now, crys Venus, altho you're my Spouse, [If] you Bitch me, you Brute, have a care of your Brows   transitive. To behave like a bitch towards (a person); to be spiteful, malicious, or unfair to (a person); to let (a person) down. 1764   D. Garrick Let. 23 Aug. (1963) II. 423   I am a little at a loss what You will do for a Woman Tragedian to stare & tremble wth yr Heroes, if Yates should bitch You—but she must come.   intransitive. To engage in spiteful or malicious criticism or gossip, esp. about another person; to talk spitefully or cattily about. 1915   G. Cannan Young Earnest i. x. 92   It's the women bitching at you got into your blood.   intransitive. Originally U.S. To grumble, to complain (about something, or at someone). Frequently collocated with moan. 1930   Amer. Speech 5 238   [Colgate University slang] He bitched about the course.   †3. intransitive. To back down, to yield. Obsolete. rare. 1777   E. Burke Let. 9 May in Corr. (1961) III. 339   Norton bitched a little at last, but though he would recede; Fox stuck to his motion.   Shit shit (v.) Old English scitan, from Proto-Germanic *skit- (source also of North Frisian skitj, Dutch schijten, German scheissen), from PIE(proto indo-european) root *skei- "to cut, split." The notion is of "separation" from the body (compare Latin excrementum, from excernere "to separate," Old English scearn "dung, muck," from scieran "to cut, shear;" see sharn). It is thus a cousin to science and conscience.   "Shit" is not an acronym. Nor is it a recent word. But it was taboo from 1600 and rarely appeared in print (neither Shakespeare nor the KJV has it), and even in the "vulgar" publications of the late 18c. it is disguised by dashes. It drew the wrath of censors as late as 1922 ("Ulysses" and "The Enormous Room"), scandalized magazine subscribers in 1957 (a Hemingway story in Atlantic Monthly) and was omitted from some dictionaries as recently as 1970 ("Webster's New World"). [Rawson]   It has extensive slang usage; the meaning "to lie, to tease'' is from 1934; that of "to disrespect" is from 1903. Also see shite. Shat is a humorous past tense form, not etymological, first recorded 18th century.   To shit bricks "be very frightened" attested by 1961. The connection between fear and involuntary defecation has generated expressions in English since the 14th century. (the image also is in Latin), and probably also is behind scared shitless (1936).   shit (n.) Middle English shit "diarrhea," from Old English scitte "purging, diarrhea," from source of shit (v.). The general sense of "excrement" dates from 1580s (Old English had scytel, Middle English shitel for "dung, excrement;" the usual 14c. noun for natural discharges of the bodies of men or beasts seems to have been turd or filth). As an exclamation attested in print by 1920 but certainly older. Use for "obnoxious person" is by 1508; meaning "misfortune, trouble" is attested from 1937. Shit-faced "drunk" is 1960s student slang; shit list is from 1942. Shit-hole is by 1937 as "rectum," by 1969 in reference to undesirable locations. Shitload (also shit-load) for "a great many" is by 1970. Shitticism is Robert Frost's word for scatological writing.   Up shit creek "in trouble" is by 1868 in a South Carolina context (compare the metaphoric salt river, of which it is perhaps a coarse variant). Slang not give a shit "not care" is by 1922. Pessimistic expression same shit different day is attested by 1989. To get (one's) shit together "manage one's affairs" is by 1969. Emphatic shit out of luck is by 1942. The expression when the shit hits the fan "alluding to a moment of crisis or its disastrous consequences" is attested by 1967.   Expressing anger, despair, surprise, frustration, resignation, excitement, etc. 1865   Proc. Court Martial U.S. Army (Judge Advocate General's Office) U.S. National Arch.: Rec. group 153, File MM-2412 3 Charge II.   Private James Sullivan...did in contemptuous and disrespectful manner reply..‘Oh, shit, I can't' or words to that effect.   Ass/Asshole The word arse in English derives from the Proto-Germanic (reconstructed) word *arsaz, from the Proto-Indo-European word *ors-, meaning "buttocks" or "backside". The combined form arsehole is first attested from 1500 in its literal use to refer to the anus. The metaphorical use of the word to refer to the worst place in a region (e.g., "the arsehole of the world"), is first attested in print in 1865; the use to refer to a contemptible person is first attested in 1933. In the ninth chapter of his 1945 autobiography, Black Boy, Richard Wright quotes a snippet of verse that uses the term: "All these white folks dressed so fine / Their ass-holes smell just like mine ...". Its earliest known usage in newspapers as an insult was 1965. As with other vulgarities, these uses of the word may have been common in oral speech for some time before their first appearances in print. By the 1970s, Hustler magazine featured people they did not like as "Asshole of the Month." In 1972, Jonathan Richman of Modern Lovers recorded his song "Pablo Picasso", which includes the line "Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole."   Until the early 1990s, the word was considered one of a number of words that could not be uttered on commercial television in the United States. Comedian Andrew Dice Clay caused a major shock when he uttered the word during a televised MTV awards show in 1989. However, there were PG-13 and R-rated films in the 1980s that featured use of the word, such as the R-rated The Terminator (1984), the PG-13-rated National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989), and the PG-rated Back to the Future (1985). By 1994, however, vulgarity had become more acceptable, and the word was featured in dialog on the long-running television series NYPD Blue, though it has yet to become anything close to commonplace on network TV. In some broadcast edits (such as the syndication airings of South Park), the word is partially bleeped out, as "assh—". A variant of the term, "ass clown", was coined and popularized by the 1999 comedy film Office Space.   The word is mainly used as a vulgarity, generally to describe people who are viewed as stupid, incompetent, unpleasant, or detestable. Moral philosopher Aaron James, in his 2012 book, Assholes: A Theory, gives a more precise meaning of the word, particularly to its connotation in the United States: A person, who is almost always male, who considers himself of much greater moral or social importance than everyone else; who allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically; who does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement; and who is immunized by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people. He feels he is not to be questioned, and he is the one who is chiefly wronged.   Many would believe the term ass to be used to describe an ungulate or a hoofed mammal of the smaller variety. Those people would be correct. However ass would be used as slang to describe the incompetence of people as they seem to resemble that of a donkey. Slow and stupid. We don't see donkeys in this manner but the people of old may have.   A stupid, irritating, or contemptible person; a person who behaves despicably. Cf. arsehole n. 3, shithole n. 2. Quot. 1954, from a story originally told in 1933, provides evidence for the development of this sense from figurative uses of sense 1. [1954   V. Randolph Pissing in Snow (1976) lxx. 106   When God got the job [of making men and women] done,..there was a big pile of ass-holes left over. It looks to me like the Almighty just throwed all them ass-holes together, and made the Easton family.]   Dick/dickhead   Dick is a common English language slang word for the human penis. It is also used by extension for a variety of slang purposes, generally considered vulgar, including: as a verb to describe sexual activity; and as a term for individuals who are considered to be rude, abrasive, inconsiderate, or otherwise contemptible. In this context, it can be used interchangeably with jerk, and can also be used as a verb to describe rude or deceitful actions. Variants include dickhead, which literally refers to the glans. The offensiveness of the word dick is complicated by the continued use of the word in inoffensive contexts, including as both a given name (often a nickname for Richard) and a surname, the popular British dessert spotted dick, the classic novel Moby-Dick, the Dick and Jane series of children's books, and the American retailer Dick's Sporting Goods. Uses like these have given comic writers a foundation to use double entendre to capitalize on this contradiction. In the mid-17th century, dick became slang for a man as a sexual partner. For example, in the 1665 satire The English Rogue by Richard Head, a "dick" procured to impregnate a character that is having difficulty conceiving:   “The next Dick I pickt up for her was a man of a colour as contrary to the former, as light is to darkness, being swarthy; whose hair was as black as a sloe; middle statur'd, well set, both strong and active, a man so universally tryed, and so fruitfully successful, that there was hardly any female within ten miles gotten with child in hugger-mugger, but he was more than suspected to be Father of all the legitimate. Yet this too, proved an ineffectual Operator.”   An 1869 slang dictionary offered definitions of dick including "a riding whip" and an abbreviation of dictionary, also noting that in the North Country, it was used as a verb to indicate that a policeman was eyeing the subject. The term came to be associated with the penis through usage by men in the military around the 1880s.   The term "dick" was originally used to describe a vile or repulsive individual in the 1960s.   A stupid, annoying, or objectionable person (esp. a male); one whose behaviour is considered knowingly obnoxious, provocative, or disruptive. Cf. dick n.1 6. 1960   S. Martinelli Let. 28 Dec. in C. Bukowski & S. Martinelli Beerspit Night & Cursing. (2001) 132   You shd listen to yr own work being broadcast [on the radio]... You cd at least tell ME when to list[en] dickhead!   Twat noun Slang: Vulgar. vulva. First recorded in 1650–60; perhaps originally a dialectal variant of thwat, thwot (unattested), presumed Modern English outcome of Old English thwāt, (unattested), akin to Old Norse thveit “cut, slit, forest clearing” (from northern English dialect thwaite “forest clearing”)   What does twat mean? Twat is vulgar slang for “vagina.” It's also used, especially in British English slang, a way to call someone as stupid, useless, or otherwise contemptible person. While twat has been recorded since the 1650s, we don't exactly know where it comes from. One theory connects twat to the Old English term for “to cut off.” The (bizarre) implication could be that women's genitalia were thought to be just shorter versions of men's.   Twat was popularized in the mid-1800s completely by accident. The great English poet Robert Browning had read a 1660 poem that referred, in a derogatory way, to a “nun's twat.” Browning thought a twat must have been a kind of hat, so he incorporated it into his own work.   Words for genitalia and other taboo body parts (especially female body parts) have a long history of being turned into abusive terms. Consider a**, d*ck, p***y, among many others. In the 1920s, English speakers started using twat as an insult in the same way some use a word like c**t, although twat has come to have a far less offensive force than the c-word in American English. In the 1930s, twat was sometimes used as a term of abuse for “woman” more generally, and over the second half of the 1900s, twat was occasionally used as slang for “butt” or “anus” in gay slang.   Twat made headlines in June 2018 when British actor Danny Dyer called former British Prime Minister David Cameron a twat for his role in initiating the Brexit referendum in 2016—and then stepping down after it passed.   Twat is still common in contemporary use as an insult implying stupidity, especially among British English speakers.   Even though it's a common term, twat is still vulgar and causes a stir when used in a public setting, especially due to its sexist nature. Public figures that call someone a twat are often publicly derided. Online, users sometimes censor the term, rendering it as tw*t or tw@t.   If you're annoying, you might be accused of twattiness; if you're messing around or procrastinating, you might be twatting around; if you're going on about something, you might be twatting on. Twatting is also sometimes substituted for the intensifier ”fucking”.   As a term of abuse: a contemptible or obnoxious person; a person who behaves stupidly; a fool, an idiot. Now chiefly British. The force of this term can vary widely. Especially when applied to a woman, it can be as derogatory and offensive as the term cunt (cunt n. 2a), but it can also be used (especially of men) as a milder form of abuse without conscious reference to the female genitals, often implying that a person's behaviour, appearance, etc., is stupid or idiotic, with little or no greater force than twit (twit n.1 2b). 1922   ‘J. H. Ross' Mint (1936) xxxv. 110   The silly twat didn't know if his arse-hole was bored, punched, drilled, or countersunk. The top 10 movies with the most swear words: The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013) – 715 Uncut Gems (Josh and Benny Safide, 2019) – 646 Casino (Martin Scorsese, 1995) – 606 Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (Kevin Smith, 2001) – 509 Fury (David Ayer, 2014) – 489 Straight Outta Compton (F. Gary Gray, 2015) – 468 Summer of Sam (Spike Lee, 1999) – 467 Nil By Mouth (Gary Oldman, 1997) – 432 Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992) – 418 Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (Mike Judge, 1996) – 414

Steve brings a creepy-not'sta to this week's show but the little (well known) author Ambrose Bierce. 'The Secret of MacArger's Gulch' may be a quote-unquote professional tale, but it shares a lot of similarities with the stuff we normally read 'round here.  So break out your ye-olde-American-English translation dictionaries and strap in.  Source: https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/The_Secret_of_Macarger%27s_Gulch

[Sponsored by amazon.co.jp] Get the keys to unlock your career potential with "Gaishikei Urawaza Eigo - Kihon no KEY"! This podcast is hosted by two comedians, BJ Fox and Terumi Ishii, who have experience working for foreign companies.  You can enjoy learning English that you can use right away on a variety of business topics such as presentations, brainstorming, negotiation, and more.  Recommended for those who work in the global arena, as well as for those who want to improve their English communication skills and advance their careers. New episodes available every Thursday, on your favorite podcast app! Follow and stay tuned for the latest episode. Tap for a direct link to your favorite podcast app: • Amazon Music https://amzn.to/3xeNlQb • Apple Podcast https://apple.co/3RQqouB • Spotify https://spoti.fi/3BtjaHG • Google Podcast https://bit.ly/3qo4u6b Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do you ever wonder if you are pronouncing English words correctly? Well today I'm going to help you with 6 English words that might be a problem for you. This is at no fault of your own, these words require specific word stress or vowel sounds and sometimes they aren't pronounced according to how they are spelt. The SECRET to being able to pronounce these words correctly is to LISTEN to the correct pronunciation, and then copy when you speak. Learning to CORRECTLY PRONOUNCE these words will increase your CONFIDENCE, so listen to this podcast to hear how these 6 words should sound. At the end of the episode I also include 4 BONUS WORDS so make sure to listen until the end! The rules for English pronunciation can be hard, but I'm here to help. If you're looking for even more information on how to correctly pronounce words in American English, join my online training program at www.pronunciationpro.com to get started. We're here to help!

Are you living intentionally, and are you studying consciously? Or are you living on autopilot like the majority of people day-to-day? Tune in to this week's episode and season 1 finale to learn a bit more about what it means to “live on autopilot”, why that can hurt your success, and how you can switch things up to become more intentional! Want to dive deeper and create your success strategy? Let's talk! Message me on WhatsApp: https://wa.me/message/ATIRTKSRZIVRC1

Today's English expression and dialog: Put the squeeze on someone   Where's Tim? The cops got him. How'd they find him? They put the squeeze on me~ It was Tim or me.   GET FREE LESSONS: I'm on iTunes and everywhere else they have podcasts! MAGIC MIND—Do More, Stress Less This is my DAILY LIFE FUEL! No more Starbucks coffee for me! I'm saving money and losing weight. And I still have all the energy the coffee gave me! Get some and get clean body and mind energy and help support me!    You will get a 20% discount on a one-time purchase. BUT with the code EEE20 you can get a 40% discount on a subscription! That's what I got^^ Coach Shane? I'm from the USA, I make videos and podcasts for

This is the story of "Mad" Dave Woodbridge.  Dave is a transplant from England.  He has lived in Texas for 17 years.  A few months ago, Dave reached the depths of despair, wondering what to do next in his life.  Waking up the next morning with a vicious hang over, Dave made the decision to visit every state in the union to prove the American dream is available to anyone, even a "Mad" Englishman.  Dave pays for his adventure by Uber driving, delivering hundreds of meals.  His goal is to help others understand that  no one is immune to achieving their hearts' desire in this great country. Dave is not a TikToker, but the platform has become his stage to spread the "Mad" Dave message.  His followers continue to grow with a steady pace as dreamers and believers flock to Dave's account. Dave is just getting started with his trek through the Union.  Be sure to follow Dave on TikTok  https://www.tiktok.com/@themaddaveshow The American Dream is live and well!  

Patricia Trainor – New series stories: On this one she talks about Irish words that have found their way to everyday conversation in American English...with TRE's Ger Sweeney

What is the SECRET to sounding more FLUENT and NATURAL when speaking American English? The answer is learning how to link and when to pause in a sentence. In my latest podcast episode, I'm going to give you exclusive access to one of my trainings on the Pronunciation Pro website. In this training, I go over the rules of linking and go through great EXAMPLES showing these rules. I also go over pausing and how and when to do it. Listen to this podcast to learn how you can sound like a Native English Speaker. After learning these TIPS and TRICKS, you will feel more CONFIDENT and sound more NATURAL when communicating with others. If you are looking for more information on CORRECT sounds, rhythm, word stress, sentence stress, intonation, and the rules and concepts of American English, join Pronunciation Pro today! RESOURCES: Get Your Free Linking Worksheet HERE!

[Timestamps] “ReonaとAbeのcheck in time” - 00:50 "What's going on in America” - $3 Movie Ticket 12:24 Main Topic - 19:10 [English] In this week's episode, we will share American sayings that foreigners find weird that American's say. We will share these sayings and explain what they mean. Do Abe and Reona think the phrases are funny? Do you think the phrases are weird? Scoot Over [日本語] 今週のエピソードでは、外国人にとって、面白く聞こえるアメリカ人が言う英語フレーズを紹介します！これらのフレーズを紹介し、その意味も説明します。私たちはフレーズが変だと思うのでしょうか？皆さんは変だと思いますか？ [Connect with Us] Email: beingamericanizedjapanese@gmail.com Instagram: amejapa_official clubhouse: @reona_nmr @abe_stun https://profile.ameba.jp/ameba/minkipedia/ お待ちしてます! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/beingamericanizedjapanese/support

Are you someone that watches TV/movies, listens to podcasts, and uses vocabulary-building APPs online - but still feels frustrated with your fluency skills in English? Like many learners, you could be focused on the wrong strategy, the wrong resources, and have a goal that's NOT helping you reach success. Today, you'll hear my student, May's story. You'll hear why she came to me for help and the steps we took to redefine the entire way she was learning English. Now she's on the path to success. Would you like to get on that path, too? Send me a message and let's get started! https://wa.me/message/ATIRTKSRZIVRC1

LetsMasterEnglish.com The Let's Master English Podcast is an English Radio show for people studying English (ESL/EFL). This podcast is LOADED with great education and entertainment…EDUTAINMENT! In this episode: A GOAT was arrested! Queen Elizabeth loved BOWLING! Weather forecast A quiz Merriam Webster's new words to the dictionary Country Shane's Facts Things to celebrate, Today in History and some birthdays Lots of music requests, too! Our music lineup included requests for The Cult (for Viola), Twisted Sister (for Serge) and Ataraxia (for Vasily). There's a lot more music, too! Please let me know what you think. Send me an email. And send me song requests/dedications, too.  DailyDictationMembers@gmail.com Get free lessons: https://www.LetsMasterEnglish.com Coach Shane? I'm from the USA, I make videos and podcasts for

Easy English Expressions...E-cubed!! Listen and Learn English FREE!!   Today's English expression and dialog: In and of themselves/itself   That writer is so amazing. When they said a documentary on history, I thought BORING. Me, too. History, in and of itself, is boring. Right. But the author was so good! He made history fun! GET FREE LESSONS: I'm on iTunes and everywhere else they have podcasts! MAGIC MIND—Do More, Stress Less This is my DAILY LIFE FUEL! No more Starbucks coffee for me! I'm saving money and losing weight. And I still have all the energy the coffee gave me! Get some and get clean body and mind energy and help support me!    You will get a 20% discount on a one-time purchase. BUT with the code EEE20 you can get a 40% discount on a subscription! That's what I got^^ Coach Shane? I'm from the USA, I make videos and podcasts for

Find the full transcript at  https://enbooo.com/.  Here are the five expressions you'll learn how to use in this episode: pry, be a Curious George, keep something from someone, Do you mind?! Nonya? Nonyabusiness! Listen to the story and discover how YOU can use them!Support the show

There are so many words that are commonplace these days and we maybe don't realise that their origins lie in the Irish language. In this episode Patricia takes us through some of them.

In today's English lesson, you will learn more English words to use in your next conversation. Words like shuffle, marine, doggie door, and so many others.

Lola Valentine is back with another rewatch episode of the original Winx Club series, continuing with Season 1, Episode 15, and comparing the original Cinelume/Rai english dub with the first American English dub by 4Kids Entertainment. Listen all the way to the end of the show to get a sneak peek at next week's guest! If you would like to watchalong with Lola as we venture into the 1st season of Winx Club, head on over to the playlist on YouTube where you can watch every episode as we go over them on the podcast! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTAynfgXqkUK12kNNYr4jhW09nj1idDHJ Discover even more magic when you follow @WinxForeverPodcast on social media! Want to be featured on the show? Leave a voice message for Lola asking a question and you might be featured on the next episode! Head over to www.Anchor.fm/WinxForeverPodcast *Music: Big Wild - “She Makes Magic” http://www.bigwildmusic.com

In this episode, there are two parts. In Part 1, you'll hear a joke, practice your pronunciation and learn the expression "Off the Record". In Part 2 of today's lesson (available on Thursday, September 15th), we're going to talk about The Monster Study, a wildly unethical study (by today's standards) that is about orphans and language development, specifically stuttering.To amp up the learning experience in episode 129, I explain challenging words and phrases as I go along. The American English Accent Course As mentioned in the audio, if you're interested in improving your pronunciation and overall accent in English, check out this course. Hours of videos and transcripts will help you hone the nuances of American English, from word stress, syllable stress and connected speech to reductions, vowel sounds and so much more. Check it out.Premium ContentThis episode is part of Season 3. By purchasing Season 3 transcripts, you'll be able to access the full episodes, the full PDF transcripts for episodes 101 - 150, an Mp3 download  and the premium podcast player to work on your pronunciation. Follow along with the Season 3 audio (episodes 101-150) as episodes are released. Season 3..Other Links!Get ALL PREMIUM CONTENT FOR SEASONS 1-3  (including transcripts + mp3s)Get ONLY the Transcripts for Episodes 001 - 100. Get the Free E-Book: 101 American English Slang Words Support the show

On this review episode of the English 2.0 Podcast, we discuss a very important topic in American English pronunciation:Word Stress: How to Emphasize the Right SyllablesHow can we emphasize certain parts of words to sound more natural?Al answers this and much more on this special review episode of the English 2.0 PodcastOn the English 2.0 Podcast, I help you express yourself more naturally and smoothly. We go beyond the words and phrases and talk about how to make your English sound more natural, proper mindset, and success principles.Do you have a question?Please email me at: al AT alsensei DOT comPlease check out my new book "English Fluency Power" for your complete fluency guide!

Today's English expression and dialog: From Timbuktu to Kalamazoo   Wow, you have so many friends! Yes! And they're all fascinating. It looks like lots of foreign names, too. Sure! I've got friends from Timbuktu to Kalamazoo!   GET FREE LESSONS: I'm on iTunes and everywhere else they have podcasts! MAGIC MIND!! This is my DAILY LIFE FUEL! Get some and get clean energy and help support me!    You will get a 20% discount on a one-time purchase. BUT with the code EEE20 you can get a 40% discount on a subscription! That's what I got^^ Coach Shane? I'm from the USA, I make videos and podcasts for

Idioms are a fascinating and colorful part of the English language. Learning idioms goes beyond learning vocabulary. It is about learning the culture, as they reflect social norms, beliefs, attitudes, and emotions. They highly affect fluency, but they are quite difficult to teach and learn. One of the reasons why idioms are tricky is because there are so many! So where should you start? With the most common ones! According to a corpus-based study, where they analyzed the frequency of different idioms in today's American English among over 520 million words, these 10 idioms are among the most frequent ones in today's American English.Visit an extended list here: https://blog.talaera.com/american-idioms Visit our business English programs here: Business English Training (https://bit.ly/3vQpgyl).Join a free webinar: Free Webinars (https://bit.ly/3BSySZB)

For about an hour, you can ask your questions about learning English and American culture to an American English teacher.

Are there times where you wish you were more RESPECTED when you spoke English? Luckily there is a way that you can gain GREATER respect when speaking American English CLEARLY. In this podcast episode, I'm going to give you 2 STEPS TO GAIN GREATER RESPECT through clear English communication. It can be difficult at first to learn how to do this, but I'm here to help. If you are ready to gain that RESPECT and CONFIDENCE that you are looking for when speaking American English, join me at www.pronunciationpro.com to start TODAY.

If you're looking for some 1:1 classes, look no further! With the EB Combo you will discover a new topic every week. Simply go over the the material, learn new expressions and then meet with me 1:1 to put into practice what you've learned! For more information, visit https://enbooo.com/eb-combo/Support the show

Ever wondered what actually worked in achieving success in English, especially with a specific goal like moving abroad and getting a job in English? Tune in to hear Corina Banica's success story of moving to Canada and how she approached learning with a “reverse-engineered” philosophy. See how it aligns with the English Success System and how you, too, can start your journey to success today! Send me a message on WhatsApp to get started:  https://wa.me/message/ATIRTKSRZIVRC1

Our discussion of spelling differences between American English and British English continues.

Free eBook "Learn New Words 5 Times Faster": https://www.clarkandmiller.com/learn-english-fast/ ______ Improve your pronunciation AND your listening skills with these 5 English pronunciation tips. Learn about: 1. Jump to the potato! (stress-timed vs. syllable-timed languages) Is your first language stress-timed or syllable-timed? What does that mean for your English pronunciation? How does it affect the hip-hop in your country? 2. Always contract! It might feel like the smart thing to do. But don't do it! Never "decontract"! Unless you want to really emphasize something. 3. Look out for "tits" and "dits" I'll say no more about this here ... :) 4. Watch out for the difference between "can" and "can't" With a lot of American English pronunciation, "can" and "can't" sometimes sound the same. This hack will give you the skills to understand whether that American guy is saying that you CAN borrow a hundred bucks or whether he's saying you CAN'T borrow a hundred bucks. 5. Look out for "therza" It's more common than you might think ... ______ www.clarkandmiller.com

This Week In Culture Episode 262 (Raising Kanan S2 Ep3; The Chi S5 Ep9): American English. This Week Ant and J. Johnson are back at it with another review of #RaisingKanan on #Starz and #TheChi on #Showtime. The guys break down the latest with Kanan, Raquel and the family in Queens before heading to the Midwest to discuss the latest with Emmett, Kevin and the rest of our Chicago homies. Click the and subscribe now! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thisweekinculture/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thisweekinculture/support

Find the full transcript at  https://enbooo.com/.  Here are the five expressions you'll learn how to use in this episode: slowly but surely, you win some, you lose some, go in circles, come a long way, sooner or later! Listen to the story and discover how YOU can use them!Support the show

Do you find it hard to understand Native English speakers when they talk? Does it feel like they are talking too quickly and you just can't understand what they are saying? This is something that almost all non native English speakers struggle with, and it is completely normal. But the good news is that you can learn how to UNDERSTAND them, even when they talk quickly! You can't always ask someone to simply slow down so that you can better understand them, but after listening to this podcast, you will have a much better understanding of what you CAN do in these situations. In this episode, I'm going to go through 4 STRATEGIES TO UNDERSTAND FAST ENGLISH SPEAKERS. It's critically important that you understand completely when someone is talking to you, and I want to help you gain the right communication skills that you need to be able to have SUCCESSFUL CONVERSATIONS with native English speakers, even when they are speaking quickly. If you are ready to learn more about American English intonation, syllable stress, and word stress, join me at www.pronunciationpro.com to get started today. You'll get the roadmap you need to both understand easily and even learn to sound like a Native American English speaker!

Confronted with a long chair on which one longues, some American English speakers call it a "chaise longue" and some call it a "chaise lounge."

Today's English expression and dialog: potayto, potahto…   Did you get the red onions for the salad? I got these yellow ones! On sale!! What? Yellow onions on a salad? Are you crazy? Eh~ Potayto, potahto~ GET FREE LESSONS: I'm on iTunes and everywhere else they have podcasts!   MAGIC MIND!! This is my DAILY LIFE FUEL! Get some and get clean energy and help support me!    You will get a 20% discount on a one-time purchase. BUT with the code EEE20 you can get a 40% discount on a subscription! That's what I got^^ Coach Shane? I'm from the USA, I make videos and podcasts for

Comparing British and American English vocabulary with a fun online quiz. My guest today is American comedian Sarah Donnelly. Video version (of the conversation) available.Episode page with vocabulary notes & intro transcript

Don't be afraid to show up as YOU, mistakes and all! Tune in to hear why and how authenticity will help your confidence and increase your ability to speak and use English. Connect back with our interview this month to understand why showing up and making mistakes can actually help you more than perfectionism. This doesn't mean you can be sloppy or lazy, and you must be mindful of your mistakes, weaknesses, and professional needs; however, becoming more authentic will help you reduce fear, build confidence and actually start using English. Start with self-compassion, and if you want support, let's connect!  Get started with me on WhatsApp:  https://wa.me/message/ATIRTKSRZIVRC1

MAGICMIND! 20% off here: 40% off subscription with code EEE And if you get MagicMind, send me a picture and I'll give you call to check your English! THIS EXPIRES in TEN DAYS (Sept 2nd of 2022)!! Today's English expression and dialog: MY GUILTY PLEASURE!! What's that? Ice cream. Yes. Chocolate chip cookie ice cream… But you always tell us you only eat healthy food! I know. This is my guilty pleasure~     GET FREE LESSONS: I'm on iTunes and everywhere else they have podcasts!   Coach Shane? I'm from the USA, I make videos and podcasts for

JONESY! JONESY! JONESY! #BreakingBill continues with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). Sean is once again joined by Bill from 'Bill Reads Bad Reviews'. 14 years since the film came out, Sean and Bill re-assess the film and use words such as "chills" and "Heart-warming". This podcasts' opinions about films are just getting bolder and bolder. Discussion Points: -The nuke the fridge scene. -George Lucas Director's Cuts. -Bill puts the boot into Sean's age, again. -Indiana Jones's great entrance in this film. -Tom Hanks is watching Sean as he sleeps. -Bill throws some insults about Sean's age-have the bad reviews had a bad influence on Bill? -The bathroom, the loo, the john, the restroom. -Bill and Sean get side-tracked by accents and differences between UK English or American English. -Bill compares pineapple-on-pizza with baked beans, much to Sean's disgust. -Sean gets so close to getting through a review without mentioning The Batman. Random Questions: -Are they gophers? -What is it with Sean and two-disc special edition DVDs? -Is it popular to stick the boot into this film? -Is Sean anti-American? -Did Harrison Ford enjoy making Cowboys & Aliens more than this film? -Why won't Sean swear in front of Bill? -Can Sean do an impression of Ray Winstone? Quotes of the episode: -"Positive...pessimistic together, who doesn't want that?" -"Really this is the Indiana Jones film that makes you go...hang on...this isn't realistic?" -"What were we talking about?" -"CGI gophers, why not?" -"New Mexico, I don't know what crawls around in holes down there" -"Salted popcorn? What sick freak invented that!?" -"You don't drink ice tea?" -"Chai Latte's are good, put it on the record"-BRBR 2022. -"What kind of episode is it, if we don't get off track?". -"Tell me I'm ready! No you're not!" More information about my guest is available here: Support Bill Reads Bad Reviews on Ko-fi.com! ❤️ - Ko-fi ❤️ Where creators get support from fans through donations, memberships, shop sales and more! The original 'Buy Me a Coffee' Page. Thanks for listening!

LetsMasterEnglish.com The Let's Master English Podcast is a English Radio show for people studying English (ESL/EFL). This podcast is LOADED with great education and entertainment…EDUTAINMENT! In this episode: Christmas at Costco! Pumpkin Spice Latte! Tomato Shortage~ LinkedIn Photos for $1000!! Facial Expression Coaches Today we Celebrate… Today in History There's a lot more music, too! Please let me know what you think. Send me an email. And send me song requests/dedications, too.  DailyDictationMembers@gmail.com Get free lessons: https://www.LetsMasterEnglish.com Coach Shane? I'm from the USA, I make videos and podcasts for

LetsMasterEnglish.com The Let's Master English Podcast is a English Radio show for people studying English (ESL/EFL). This podcast is LOADED with great education and entertainment…EDUTAINMENT! In this episode: You need $1000 MORE EVERY MONTH to survive Airline Pilots FALL ASLEEP~ Burger King will make you CRY~ Country Shane has the facts on ONIONS and BALDNESS!! Today we Celebrate… Today in History A poll (questionnaire) on HEALTH MagicMind! Lots of music requests, too! Juan wanted to hear a James Brown song! The Stones for Kees and a whole lot more!   Please let me know what you think. Send me an email. And send me song requests/dedications, too.  DailyDictationMembers@gmail.com Get free lessons: https://www.LetsMasterEnglish.com Coach Shane? I'm from the USA, I make videos and podcasts for