Episode 62 Listening Practise and English Vocabulary Analysis from Terry Pratchett's Jingo

This episode is shot on location in Workington. It is great listening practise for you and after the reading I'll go into detail about some of the vocabulary. The main connecting feature of the readings from Episodes 60, 61 and 62 is the weather. British people LOVE talking about the weather. Here we have three British writers each describing stormy, windy, rainy weather in different ways and with different emotions, so I'll analyse all of that. This episode the reading is from my favourite writer ever! Terry Pratchett, who wrote a fantasy fiction series called Discworld. This excerpt is from a section of the book where a police officer (Vimes) is in hot pursuit of a ship that has abducted one of his officers. With him are Jenkins, the captain of the ship and Detritus, another (troll) police officer. Now it's your turn! This weekend have a go at writing a short paragraph. You can describe the sea, the weather or both. You can talk about today, or a day in the past, a favourite day or an imagined day, your choice. See you next week, have a great weekend! Let's look at some of the vocabulary in the excerpt: feverishly - quickly and under pressure billowed - flap and catch the wind mast - the tall main column in the centre of a sailing boat spluttered - coming and going, struggling to go billows - moving and flowing lurched - a kind of uncomfortable, uneven movement Let's talk about the writing. As I mentioned in the podcast, the fact that Terry writes Fantasy Satire novels means a lot of his vocabulary is chosen to be funny. We can see two of the character's totally different reactions to the fire: 'It dun't even feel warm,' said Detritus, poking the flame. (In this case Terry is writing in Detritus' accent so the spelling is wrong.) Jenkins: 'It means we're going to die in a dreadful storm!' We have a lot of similar language to the other two readings: wind howled and the clouds 'like ink streaming into water' We also have a lot of movement in the language which helps us feel a bit overwhelmed by all the things happening at the same time, probably similar to how the characters feel. Then the green fire ran down the masts and, when it hit the deck, burst into dozens of green balls that rolled, cracking and spitting over the planks. A green flame spluttered over his helmet. Clouds were racing across- No, they were pouring into the sky in great twisting billows, like ink streaming into water. Blue light flashed somewhere inside them. The ship lurched. All of this gives us a sense of urgency, movement and impending disaster! Additional Vocabulary the wind's picked up - the wind has picked up - we use the phrasal verb 'pick up' to describe the wind when it suddenly gets stronger or when (as on this day) it suddenly comes out of an otherwise calm day. Detritus - In English we have a saying 'don't make fun of someone who mispronounces a word when they've obviously learned it from reading'. It's really common for people who read a lot, like me, to mispronounce words that we've never actually heard and only read😌. (It's not just learners of English that find the spelling and pronunciation a challenge!) I was super horrified to discover that the first time I realised I'd been mispronouncing this word was when I was working on subtitling this episode!😫 I've been reading Terry Pratchett for 10 years and this is one of my favourite characters! Horrified!😱 True life scenario! So the pronunciation should be 'de TRY tus' - which means waste or debris. Terry often plays with words when he names his characters. In this case this character starts off very useless, but by this point in the series he is one of Vimes' most trusted officers. #esl #english #englishlistening #englishreading #reading #discworld #emmaseslenglish #englishpodcast #englishvocabulary