1. Thanks to Robin Skipsey for sending this one, prompted by the 110-year-old Cambridge exam questions the other day, 10 ‘grammar rules’ it’s OK to break (sometimes) by Steven Pinker https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/15/steven-pinker-10-grammar-rules-break

2. Native Speakerism – what is it and why does it matter? is the title of a trenchant piece that three British Council former colleagues, Ann Veitch, Ebru Weston & Huma Riaz, have just published on the British Council blog https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/native-speakerism-%E2%80%93-what-it-and-why-does-it-matter Plus, lest there be any doubt about whether or not native speakers make good teachers, a 2016 piece from the BBC archives, Native English speakers are the world’s worst communicators https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20161028-native-english-speakers-are-the-worlds-worst-communicators

Is former colleagues the expression I want, I wonder, for people with whom I used to work but no longer do, now I’m retired? Neither ex-colleagues nor one-time colleagues sounds quite right, either.

3. One of the things I do in retirement is to serve as a trustee of IH London. You can now sign up to their Teacher Portal for a month free – no credit card details required. Click on the Monthly Individual Membership button on this page https://teacherportal.ihlondon.com/membership And if you’re quick, you can use your free month’s membership to sign up for a webinar with Neil Anderson at 16:30 UK time tomorrow, Wednesday 5^th July, on TBL (Task-Based Learning) for Teens https://teacherportal.ihlondon.com/events (and five other webinars in the course of July).

4. And, finally, I’m not sure what the French for schadenfreude is; I’m not even sure what the English for schadenfreude is! When I asked Google to translate schadenfreude into French, it claimed it was an English word, the word for which in French is – you guessed! Larousse, Langenscheidt and Pons all suggest joie maligne, which has a certain ring to it and also sounds – malign joy – pretty good when translated back into English. Not that it’s at all relevant to this piece by Ed West from The Spectator, The long defeat of the French language https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-long-defeat-of-the-french-language/

I once visited the Ministry of Education in Bucharest just after the new French ambassador’s introductory visit to the ministry, to find the whole place having a collective fit of giggles because they’d arranged English translation for his meeting with the minister …