I had a dream about dangling participles last night; probably because I had a bowl of chocolate-chip, fudge brownie, chocolate ice cream followed by a second bowl of hand picked sweet cherries, before I went to bed. Instead of sugarplums dancing in my head, there were dangling participles hovering over the bedpost. It sounds kind of kinky doesn't it?

What is a participle? It is a word ending in "ing" and sometimes "ed". It looks like a verb but acts as an adjective. A participle is used to describe other words in a sentence.

The language we use programs our brains. Mastering our language gives us a great degree of mastery over our lives and our destinies. It is important to use language in the best way possible in order to dramatically improve your quality of life.

In Glasgow one of the recent best selling books over the last few years was William Laughton Lorimer’s ‘The New Testament in Scots’. Here is his description of John the Baptist from Mark’s Gospel:-

• "John wis cleadit in a raploch coat o caumel's hair an hed a lethern girth about his weyst, an locusts an foggie-bees' hinnie wis aa his fairin."

The Long and the Short of It

Really clever linguists can draw maps. They join points on a map which separate the way language is used.

One such line runs through Warwickshire not far from Stratford upon Avon. Below the line most people will use a long ‘a’ sound and above it most will prefer a shorter vowel sound.

Build Your English Vocabulary in a Flash with Flash Fiction

Do you relish intriguing stories that stir your imagination? Do you find you don’t have time for that long novel because days or weeks go by before you return to its pages again.

If the answer to either of those questions is "yes", then you’re the perfect candidate for flash fiction, an even shorter version of short stories. We dealt earlier with building your English language skills with short stories. Now, we’re going a step further and discussing this even shorter form, which means you will always have time to read a story.

Slang is it good or bad?

to have to have not

Is slang a good thing? Language guru David Crystal in his huge work on the English language , ‘The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language’ gives a whole list of reasons why it is used – to which the person I’ve just asked about it says ‘It extends the language.’