Learn with “The Word Nerd”

Inspired at an early age by the work of Dr. Seuss, Brian P. Cleary is a self-confessed “word nerd“ and the author of the best-selling books “Words Are CATegorical”, in which he presents essential English grammar points in a fun style, with the help of several cartoon Cats. Although his website does exist mainly to promote these and other books he has written, there is a great deal of material that you can download in pdf form and games to play on-line.

For example, in the main area, choose the WORDS section of the filing cabinet and play games with parts of speech (adjective, adverb, verb and so on) or write a strange story by filling in the gaps on the Crazy Cat Tales. You can also download these forms as a pdf file to print and use later.

Other sections of the web are the Word of the Week (WOW), the Poem of the Week (POW), Maths help, Poetry and Phonics, but in fact, most of the objects in the main area make a sound or do something, so just explore and have fun!

In short, this is a site recommended for kids of all ages and / or cat lovers!

——————-

Strange Random Language Fact:

A Toponym is a place name or word that began as the name of a place, such as hamburger (from Hamburg, Germany) and afghan (a soft blanket from Afghanistan).

Celebrity Almanac

Image via Wikipedia

If you’ve ever wondered about the real names of classic film stars or just how many famous people died in a particular year, then this site has all this and more.

If you can ignore the rather annoying star patterns that follow your mouse around, you’ll find an enormous amount of information collected by the author, an ex-member of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and organiser of many celebrity charity events. There are autographs of over 250 stars such as Vincent Price, Charlton Heston, Jack Lemmon (complete with spelling mistake) and Jane Russell, as well as facts about Maurice J. Micklewhite, Margarita Cansino or the unforgettable Natasha Gurdin, otherwise known as Michael Caine, Rita Hayworth and Natalie Wood.

Despite the sound of it, the Celebrity Death Dates page could end up resolving a  few discussions of the type “So and so must be dead by now …” You’ll also find curious facts such as that two people who were outstanding in completely different fields, Dizzy Gillespie and Rudolph Nureyev, both died on the 6th of January 1993.

http://www.celebrityalmanac.com/

Strange Random Language Fact:

Many languages have 50,000 words or more, but individual speakers normally know and use only a fraction of the total vocabulary: in everyday conversation people use the same few hundred words.