AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- questions and more questions!
RS: Listener Ahmed Mustaque sends this question by e-mail from somewhere in cyberspace: "Could you please tell me about the word 'being.'"
AA: "Being" is used as a verb when you talk about a continuous situation. For instance, the Irish-born playwright Oscar Wilde wrote a comedy called "The Importance of Being Earnest."
RS: It can also mean something that exists -- like a human being. There it's used as a noun. And it can modify a noun. When people say "for the time being," "being" serves as an adjective.
AA: "For the time being" means "for now," the present time -- in other words, until something changes. Some people also use "being" in place of "because" or "since," as in the phrase "being as how ... "
RS: Now, being as how we don't have much time, we move on to a question that should resound with teachers everywhere. It's from Dianne Gray in Moscow. She's new to English teaching, and we've answered some of her questions before.
AA: Recently Dianne was invited to help a group of four new students. Her question: "How can these students be corrected as a group (if so) without embarrassing anyone?"
RS: Well, as it turned out, Dianne answered her own question this time. She wrote back to say: "What I did with my new group of students was to ask them how they feel comfortable about being corrected as a group. They said I should just correct them and they would not get upset. So, we're trying that."
AA: Next a question from a listener in Bangladesh who's also written us before. Azmul Haque in Dhaka asks us to explain what's called an oxymoron.
RS That word -- which comes to us from Greek -- is a combination of words that seem to make no sense being together, yet, despite the contradiction people use them.
AA: Here are some examples: "healthy tan," "jumbo shrimp," "working vacation," "peace force" and "pretty ugly."
RS: These examples come from the "Top 20" at oxymoronlist.com. Number 20, by the way, is "government organization."
MUSIC: "Mister Ed"/Theme from 1960s TV show
AA: And now, the most unusual question we've ever gotten. A listener in China would like to know what we Americans say to a horse to urge it to move faster.
RS: "In my country?writes Pan Runzhou in Shanghai, people utter the sound like jar~jar~jar~".
AA: Well, for an answer we turn to a horse expert, Nancy Smart at Longevity Farm in Maryland:
SMART: "Actually this is kind of an interesting question, because we don't say much. If we say anything, we cluck at them [sound] -- you know, click, click, click, click. But really mostly the way we ask our horses to go faster is with our legs and our seats and our hands, non-verbal aids. If I'm asking my horse to move from a walk to a trot, I'll just squeeze gently with my calves, and he will move into a trot."
AA: "Do you ever use the expression 'whoa Nelly!'"
SMART: "Never. Never. I know what it means -- it means 'stop horse.' But it's not something that I've ever in my life used."
RS: Nancy Smart, accomplished equestrian and -- until she retired from VOA last year -- our editor on Wordmaster. But while serious riders like Nancy may bridle at the term "whoa Nelly!" it is used as slang ... to tell a PERSON to slow down, like if someone is talking too fast or coming on too strong.