English

PHOENIX -- Dorothy Bray can translate hundreds of Apache words and explain how to write their clicking and nasal sounds.She knows all about Apache grammar and how words spoken by White Mountain Apaches in central Arizona differ from those of San Carlos Apaches near Phoenix.Just just don't ask her to speak Apache."I'm too chicken," says the 60-year-old retired college teacher who spent nearly 15 years editing the new Western Apache-English Dictionary published last year by Arizona State University.

John and Leila Juracek's British friends tell them their 1929 Tudor Revival house in Baltimore's Homeland neighborhood is more like an English cottage than the country cottages in England. The L-shaped exterior is of 18-inch-thick stone dressed in ivy and topped with a second-story, timber and stucco construction. Formal gardens grace the back of the home, while inside, leaded-glass mullioned windows with chintz and toile draperies, solid traditional furniture and needlepoint rugs impart a heady sense of living on the pages of an Agatha Christie novel.

Deborah Kent, director of the Howard Community College Music Department, explores the eclectic world of vocal music in English with pianist David Wasser and cellist Benjamin Myers in this concert with music by Argento, Barber, Bolcom, Britten, Bernstein and Copland. Program takes place at 4 p.m. today in the Monteabaro Recital Hall, Horowitz Visual and performing Arts Center, 10901 Little Patuxent Parkway. Tickets are $5-$15. Call 410-772-4900.

Winters Mill High School ranked No. 36 in the state of Maryland and No. 1021 in the nation in the fourth edition of US News and World Report's listing of the best high schools in the nation. The publication evaluated nearly 22,000 public high schools in 49 states and the District of Columbia. The survey, published May 8 on the US News website, considered a number of factors including Advanced Placement performance, overall student performance and "proficiency on state exams among typically underperforming subgroups.

St. Mary's ESL program needs volunteers to teach English one night a week from January through May, 7 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings at St. Mary's High School, 109 Duke of Gloucester St., Annapolis. Teaching materials are provided. Registration for the classes will be at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the school. Call Eneida Green at 410-800-4717 or e-mail eneida_green@yahoo.com.

You can hear, in the dispute about singular they and other issues of grammar and usage, a complaint that a usage objected to is not logical. For example, the objection to the double negative is that two negatives make a positive. In mathematics, yes. But step up, you two-negatives-make-a positive people. I want to hear you say that the first time you heard Jagger sing “I can't get no satisfaction,” you understood him to mean “I'm satisfied.” At the Geoffrey Pullum post on singular they at Lingua Franca that I wrote about yesterday, a copy editor writing as odarp thought he could put Professor Pullum on the spot, asking, “If 'they' can be singular, why does it always take a plural verb?

At Johnson , C.S.W. examines that odd form of English peculiar to newspapers, journalese . "Newspapers rarely, if ever, report the facts in the way you would in conversation," he comments, and anyone who knows Paula LaRocque's classic "In a surprise move ... " understands just how far apart ordinary English conversation and the stilted, formulaic lingo of newspapers have drifted. C.S.W. writes about the British form of journalese, which you can see from The Economist 's style guide differs in many particulars from the American.

If English is not your first language, practice speaking and understanding English in a group setting at 9:30 a.m. Mondays and 7:30 p.m. Thursdays at Howard County Library's East Columbia branch, 6600 Cradlerock Way. Those interested must register with the library before attending first meeting. Call 410-313-7700.

County Councilman Jerry Walker wants to make English the official language of Anne Arundel County. That would make perfect sense if English weren't already, for all practical purposes, the county's official language. When was the last time you heard someone complain they couldn't read a county parking ticket or other official document because it was written in Urdu or Farsi? The fact that this never occurs ought to be a clue: This is not serious legislation but rather a piece of political theater that would achieve nothing more than puffing up the councilman's reputation among the anti-immigrant crowd.

On August 4, 2005, MARION ENGLISH. Beloved wife of the late Dwight Alvin English; loving mother of Jane Patricia English-Kligys, Charles R. English, Dwight A. English and June A. English. Also survived by four grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. Funeral from the Bruzdzinski Funeral Home, P.A., 1407 Old Eastern Avenue, Essex at route 702 (beltway exit 36), on Monday at 8:30 A.M. Mass of Christian Burial at 9 A.M. in Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church. Interment Gardens of Faith. Visitation Sunday, 3 to 5 and 7 to 9 P.M.

James Fitzpatrick leans back in a huge black office chair with wheels and points at a projection on a screen in the front of the classroom, not far from the Soccer Barbie dolls and a clock featuring the portrait of French writer Voltaire. "Here is the question," he says in a deep, booming, intense voice. "Is postimpressionism a movement of art or artists?" ("Artists," of course, is the answer he elicits from a student.) Fitz, as he is called by everyone, has been teaching for decades, the last 10 years at Catonsville High School.

At Throw Grammar From the Train , Jan Freeman alerts us to an article by Joan Acocella in The New Yorker on descriptivism vs. prescriptivism that will not enlighten you. Ms. Acocella rather tiresomely trots out George Orwell and Webster's Third and Dwight Macdonald and Strunk and White (Even conceding that The Elements of Style has become "a cult object," anyone writing for The New Yorker must apparently make...

Commenting from Albion, the estimable Picky recently wrote: "As I look back on a very privileged life I note that although the language I spoke mostly as a child was that of the London streets, my parents (typically of the upper working class in those days they enriched English by reading Dickens and Trollope and Austen to each other in the evenings - anyone do that nowadays?) and my school together provided me also with something very close to standard English, and I traded on that, essentially made my living from it, for the rest of my life.

Had you heard that the Kenyan Keynesian socialist Muslim sleeper agent in the White House is trying to kill off the nation's sparrows? At HeadsUp , FEV examines a Washington Free Beacon article that makes such a claim, which turns out (you did see this coming, didn't you?) to be entirely bogus. How do we know that it is bogus, apart from the surface improbability of the mere assertion? FEV took the trouble to read the links in the story itself and discovered that they completely undermine the assertion: "The most fun of all, though, is the chutzpah -- the charge-for-the-guns testiculosity involved in flat-out cold lying, then linking to the documents that show beyond doubt that you're making it up as you go along.

By all accounts Lillian Lowery, the Delaware educator who was named Maryland's state superintendent of schools Friday, comes to the job with an impressive resume and a reputation as a consensus builder who can work with teachers, principals and local school districts to get things done. She'll need all those skills and more to implement the kinds of reforms Maryland needs, and she'll have to hit the ground running if she is to make progress on the array of thorny issues that require her immediate attention.

As an 18-year old coming to the United States from England to play college soccer, Darren Eales figured the competition was not going to be as stiff as what he had faced in the motherland. "It's fair to say that when I played 20 years ago, there was a feeling of, 'What do Americans know about soccer?' " said Eales, who played first at West Virginia and later at Brown before playing professionally. "Now there's a real respect for American players. " Eales, director of football administration for Tottenham Hotspur of the English Premier League, has seen that first-hand.

Don't knock Prince Charles for championing "proper English" at the expense of the American corruption. That's his job.He's the Prince of Wales, not Brooklyn or South Georgia. They pay the guy to personify the United Kingdom and advance British interests. Linguistic imperialism is the last viable relic of empire in the modern world. He is right to run with it."We must act now to ensure that English -- and that to my way of thinking means English English -- maintains its position as the world language well into the next century," he told the British Council in London.

The Ting Tings - the English dance-punk duo of Katie White and Jules de Martino that will play Rams Head Live on Saturday - found inspiration for its latest album, March's "Sounds from Nowheresville," from three Jewish New Yorkers rapping about Humpty Dumpty, "The Empire Strikes Back" and Patty Duke. The Beastie Boys' 1989 landmark album "Paul's Boutique" seems at first like an odd muse for the Ting Tings Its platinum-selling singles ("That's Not My Name," "Shut Up and Let Me Go")

A monthly Storytime at Essex Library includes all the trappings familiar to its pre-school participants — books, puppets, songs, games and a crafts table. But this program, organized by Spanish language students at a nearby high school, gives children the chance to listen, sing and play in two languages. "Welcome to la granja, amigos," said Chesapeake High School sophomore Amanda Ambrose, who donned a straw hat and jeans in keeping with farm theme of the hour. During the bilingual story hour, the hosts switch back and forth from English to Spanish as they read to and entertain the children.