Word: english
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...uncertain that any kid of reading age in the English-speaking world slept during the first week of July as the midnight Friday release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire drew near. At the Book People bookstore in Austin, Texas, three young Harry wannabes were mesmerized by excitement as they claimed their copies of the fourth installment in J.K. Rowling's magical series. As if to confirm that there is a huge gulf between ages 11 and 14, a major part of the the latter demographic fell under the spell of a vastly different celebrity--a real...
...payoffs have been even greater on the local level. Consider El Paso, Texas, where one-third of the adult residents cannot read English and last year only 75% graduated from high school. Ten years ago, the University of Texas at El Paso joined with that city's community leaders and three of its largest and lowest-performing school districts. Today UTEP's mark is apparent everywhere, from the schools' cheery hallways (the once drab corridors are papered over with student artwork) to test scores...
...part of his morning routine, he ate an English muffin with grape jelly and drank coffee from a Styrofoam cup, then sat down to his drawing table and the long, white Strathmore board with the five-inch-by-five-inch panels in which he drew the daily strip. "He attempted to be ordinary," recalls Clark Gesner, author of the musical "You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown." He wanted to be what he thought he had always been - a regular person...
...since Charles Dickens has a novelist writing in English achieved Rowling's command over a whole society--young and not so young, of modest means and with money to flambe--and the Dickens analogy quickly outlives its usefulness. None of his novels were simultaneous best sellers in dozens of languages; the 19th century world was a markedly slower place than our own. And Dickens' audience had none of the distractions that beguile Rowling's readers: no radio, films, recorded music, TV, video and computer games, the Internet. For years, literary culture has been portrayed as gasping on life support, sustained...
...true that Bush has difficulty expressing himself in the English language. On the other hand, you can usually tell what he meant to say. His daddy was often perfectly impenetrable, and we survived. W. is highly unlikely ever to throw up on the Prime Minister of Japan, have an affair with an intern or declare war on Grenada...