rediscovering a word series 1: hint

By Terry | Published: February 1, 2012

Mighty mango juice from the Naked juice (source: The Naked Juice)

Last weekend, I visited my brother-in-law’s family who lives in Virginia. As a preparation for a trip that takes around 6 hours one way, my parents-in-law and I went shopping at Costco. We bought some fruits and juices. What kind of juices did you buy? We bought the Naked juices. It is a juice brand in the U.S. and it is pretty expensive because it claims that it does not have any artificial flavors but has only pure juice from fruits.

We bought mango juices and have drank most of them but some were left over during the trip. This morning I took that out from the refrigerator and drank it with my breakfast.

As I drank, I happend to pay attention to the bottle.

It says:

1 1/4 mangoes, 1/2 orange, 1 3/4 apples, 1/3 banana, and a hint of lemon.

As I was reading through, one word caught my eyes. It was a “hint” of lemon. Hint! I know that word. It means “a slight or indirect indication or suggestion.” I, sometimes, give out hints to students when they are struggling to solve a problem. I am sure we all know what it means in this context.

What is a hint of lemon? Is it like a small piece of lemon? That was my first guess. Luckily, it was correct. Hint also means “a very slight or hardly noticeable amount.”

It was my first time to see this word, hint, used to mean hardly noticeable amount. I gotta pay more attention to small things around me to learn, or I should say rediscover, English words.

Wow, a hint of lemon! Let me give you a hint! We do not know anything until we really dig into it.

Posted in From shopping | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

jump the shark

By Terry | Published: January 27, 2012

Who taught: Andrew

Yesterday, my friend, Andrew, came to Carnegie Mellon University to give a talk about “Agile Software Development with Scrum.” I know it might sound all greek to some of you but simply speaking it is a computer science thing.

I was there too. In my opinion, it was a very informative and useful talk. I am sure that students felt the same way.

It was also useful for me in another sense. I learned another expression from Andrew. During his talk, he said this, “Has Agile jumped the shark?” At first, I thought “jump the shark” could mean a good thing. Something like it is so great that even a shark decides to jump out of the water. Well… as Andrew continues his talk, I could feel that the expression does not have positive connotations.

However, I was not get the exact feeling of the expression.

So, I looked it up. Then I realized that the shark is not the one who jumps. It is a person or a thing jumps the shark just like you can see from the youtube video that I included here. The expression is originated from this TV show, Happy Days, that aired from 1974 to 1984.

To be able to feel this expression fully, you should imagine yourself watching a man who is really going to jump a shark. As he is getting closer and closer to the shark, you would feel more and more excited but, once jumping is done, all of the excitement is gone.

Another way you can think of is that you are riding a roller coaster. As it climbs up and up, you feel excitement but once it reaches the bottom the excitement is not there anymore.

“Jump the shark” means a moment when something that was once great has reached a point where it will now decline in quality and popularity. (source: urban dictionary)

Now, I am not sure how many of the students yesterday evening understood the expression because most of them were non-native English speakers. Maybe I should ask them later and teach this expression while I am teaching my regular computer science stuff.

Posted in From friends | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

  • Terry’s Flickr Stream