Neologisms Corner

An occasional series of entries devoted to the wonderful world of Neologism spotting in English. An awful lot of new words, meanings and phrases enter the language each year - on average, one every two hours - and an awful lot of them are total rubbish. Take this prize example, heard on the BBC news earlier on today. A police officer was describing the scene of a crash between a car, a bus and a tram in Croydon, which had left one person dead and several others seriously injured. He was explaining that they were waiting for the place to be forensically examined: '.....we are treating the scene as a crime scene, and are waiting for it to be forensicated..'
Totally bloody ugly word.

Wake me up when September ends.

Oh well, back to the whiteboard. I returned to work on monday: Now for another term full of testing, enrolment, stress and acquired colds. I'm still getting back into my stride and going through one of those 'bugger this for a game of soldiers' moments. However, there are fairly good reasons for this - we are chronically understaffed, we have a new Curriculum Manager, we have an administrator who still needs a bit of breaking in, I'm busy testing out new systems, I don't know yet how many students I'm going to have coming through the door, and the University Reprographics department has run out of its budget and doesn't have any paper. That's right, we can't print anything up. Oh, and there's been a nasty snafu about the enrolment sessions involving a buggered up booking programme, two classrooms and too many potential ESOL students. On top of that, I'm having a mare finding time to study - and there's another thing: I will have to do my Cert Ed this year on top of completing my Dip. Joy.
On the plus front however, I found this electronic version of the European Language Portfolio, which will hopefully make using portfolios with my students much, much easier.