novel = romanzo
to defuse = disinnescare
helpless = disarmato
liar = bugiardo
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Citazioni e frasi significative in inglese: We are not helpless
Month: May 2025
Special Court Established During Salem Witch Trials
27th May 1692
On this day in Salem, Massachusetts, Governor William Phips ordered the establishment of a Special Court of Oyer and Terminer (to hear and to decide). It was an attempt to bring order to the growing paranoia during what would later be known as the Salem Witch Trials. In January that year, three young girls, including the local priest’s daughter, started having fits and contorting their bodies. The blamed their behaviour on three women, one of whom confessed that she had sold her soul to the devil. The paranoia spread quickly and more than two hundred people – mostly women – were accused of witchcraft. Twenty were executed. It was only in July 2022 that the last convicted Salem ‘witch’, Elizabeth Johnson Jr., was officially exonerated.
Read Bob Lynn’s short story “The Weight of Truth”
about the Salem Witch Trials HERE
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Humour inglese: Nose hair
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The Beatles Release Sgt. Pepper’s
26th May 1967
On this day, The Beatles, released their eighth studio album, ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. The album is considered one of the first art-rock LPs and a progenitor to progressive rock, incorporating a range of styles such as vaudeville, circus, music hall, avant-garde, and Western and Indian classical music. Sgt. Pepper’s release was a defining moment in pop culture, heralding the album era and the 1967 Summer of Love, and at the same time achieving full cultural legitimisation for popular music and recognition for the medium as a genuine art form. In 1968, it won four Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, the first rock LP to receive this honour, and in 2003, it was inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. Today, it still remains one of the best-selling albums of all time.
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Lettura e ascolto intermediate in inglese: A New World, chapter 23
The adventures continue…
INTRODUZIONE
“A New World” è il primo libro di Mosè, più noto come la Genesi, raccontato in modo unico. Versi scorrevoli in rima baciata ed un incalzante ritmo trasportano il lettore dalle delizie verdeggianti del Giardino dell’Eden, oltre Noè e l’alluvione e le avventure di Abramo e Isacco, fino all’arrivo di Giuseppe in Egitto e la sua ascesa al potere come braccio destro del Faraone. Uno stile scanzonato ma mai irriverente, porta in vita i personaggi di questa storia biblica e fa di ‘A New World’ una lettura molto piacevole sia per bambini che per adulti.
Oscar Wilde Sentenced to Prison
25th May 1895
On this day, the well-known Irish author, poet and playwright, Oscar Wilde, was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. Wilde’s unsuccessful attempt to prosecute the Marquess of Queensbury for defamatory libel had had a boomerang effect and had led to Wilde himself being prosecuted for homosexual liaisons. The prison sentence was devastating for London’s most popular and influential playwright of the period, and on his release Wilde sailed the same evening for Dieppe in France, never to return to England. While in France he wrote, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol‘, a poem highlighting the brutality of the punishment that all convicts share. Towards the end, sick and dejected, and more or less confined to his hotel, Wilde joked, on one of his final trips outside, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.” He died soon after.
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Humour inglese: Modern dilemma
Cerca di individuare il gioco di parole
che dà un secondo senso alla vignetta.
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Mary Had a Little Lamb First Published
24th May 1830
On this day, the Boston publishing firm Marsh, Capen & Lyon, published the book ‘Poems for our Children’, a collection of poems by Sarah Josepha Hale which included the famous nursery rhyme, ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’ (link). Hale was one of the first American woman novelists as well as being editor for forty years of the most widely circulated magazine in the period before the Civil War, Godey’s Lady’s Book. She was also the driving force behind the creation of the American holiday known as Thanksgiving. The authorship of the poem ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’, however, remains to this day a controversy as it was also claimed by a certain Mary Sawyer (link). The poem became the first audio recording in history when Thomas Edison recited it on his newly invented phonograph in 1877 to see if the machine actually worked.
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