2016-08-24 Core: ants and animal idioms

Greg Malivuk
[email protected]
http://www.pastebin.com/u/gmalivuk - notes from all classes
---
Homework: read the article on p. 120 and do parts 3 and 4
part 3 - They are organized and altruistic, they act as one. They’re devoted to the colony.
part 4
1 T
2 T
3 F
4 T
5 F
Other words from the article that you didn’t know?
pheromones = chemicals emitted by individuals and smelled or tasted by other members of the same species (similar to hormones, but outside the body)
toiling = working hard for a long time
euphemism = a nicer or more polite way of talking about something negative or unpleasant
(dysphemism = a ruder, less polite way to say something)
---
What other animals live kind of like ants?
- bees, mole rats, meerkats, termites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality - A description of this type of social organization
---
Language focus: adverbs
p. 121 part 5 - Look for these words in the article and answer the questions about them (In these questions, “complement” means “modify”)
1 the verb “know” or the quantifier “how many”
2 the adjective “successful”
3 weighs almost nothing (“almost nothing” = “hardly anything”)
4 adverb (it modifies the verb “lead”)
5 “toiling away in a determined fashion” vs. “toiling away determinedly” (this is a bad example, because “determinedly” is actually a relatively common word, more common than the phrase “in a determined ___”)
  Why “watching in a bored way” and not “watching boredly”? - There are some -ed adjectives that we don’t add -ly to to make adverbs. (The same is true of all -ly adjectives.)

I do something in a friendly way, I don’t do it *friendlily.
(Other -ly adjectives: likely, lively, lovely, leisurely, motherly, fatherly, sisterly, brotherly)
(Sometimes the same word is an adverb: early, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly)
---
Adverbs of manner tell us the way that a verb is done. Most of these are formed with -ly.

Some adverbs have the same form as the adjective: fast, hard, straight, early...yearly (from above), late
---
part 7 - Make adverbs or adverbial prepositional phrases (“in a ___ way”) from the adjectives in parentheses, and add them to the sentences.
1 Ants are socially sophisticated creatures.
2 Ants are cooperative, but they don’t act in a friendly way towards each other.
3 An ant can lift up to 20 times its body weight, whereas most people can barely lift their own.
4 You could hardly say an ant’s brain was big.
5 A worker ant doesn’t live long (about 50 days), but a queen can live for decades.
6 Some ants, when they attack other ant colonies, cleverly emit false pheromone signals to confuse the enemy.
7 Not all ants like to work hard.
8 The slave-maker ant steals eggs and makes the newly hatched ants work for it.

“Are you working hard or hardly working?”
---
BREAK
---
Vocabulary: animal verb idioms
part 8 - What do you think each verb means, and what characteristic of the animal does it refer to?
1 bothering/annoying (a bug might fly around and annoy you)
2 winds through / twists through (a snake doesn’t take a straight path)
3 ate quickly (without really chewing) (wolves and dogs may eat like this)
4 escape (ducks dive quickly under the water, so the verb “duck” means to lower your head quickly, especially to get out of the way of something) (“duck out” = leave quietly before something is finished)
5 chased or followed (in English, “hound” usually refers to hunting dogs, which follow or chase the animals they are hunting)
6 repeating without really thinking or understanding (parrots can repeat words and sounds but don’t understand them)

Other animal verbs: pig out (eat a lot, messily), weasel out of (escape in a sneaky or tricky way), ram (hit or shove violently), rat on (tell someone’s secrets), monkey around (play without being productive), squirrel away (keep or hide something for later), chicken out (be too afraid to do something), clam up (to close your mouth and stop talking, especially from nervousness)

We also have a lot of idioms that are similes about animals:
happy as a clam, drink like a fish, strong as a bull, work like a dog, lie like a dog, busy as a bee, like water off a duck’s back, clever like a fox, eyes like a hawk, eat like a pig, piss like a racehorse, eat like a bird
---
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. = Don’t look too closely at or complain about something you receive for free.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN8T7LXdBYU - Video by a German guy about this idiom.

What animal idioms do you have in your languages?
---
Have you collected plants or animals from the wild to eat?
Have you heard the expression “hunter-gatherer” before?
---
Homework: do p. 122 parts 3, 4, 5 about the reading on p. 123