“Long time no see” is a very interesting sentence. When I first read this sentence from an American friend's email, I laughed. I thought it was a perfect example of Chinglish.

    Obviously, it is a word-by-word literal translation of the Chinese greetings with a ruled English grammar and structure! Later on, my friend told me that it is a standard American greeting. I was too surprised to believe her. Her words could not convince me at all. So I did a research on google.com. To my surprise, there are over 60 thousand web pages containing “Long time no see.” This sentence has been widely used in emails, letters, newspapers, movies, books, or any other possible places. Though it is sort of informal, it is part of the language that Americans use daily. Ironically, if you type this phrase in Microsoft Word, the software will tell you that the grammar needs to be corrected.

    Nobody knows the origin of this Chinglish sentence. Some people believe that it came from Charlie Chan's movies. In the 1930s, Hollywood moviemakers successfully created a world wide famous Chinese detective named “Charlie Chan” on wide screens. Detective Chan likes to teach Americans some Chinese wisdom by quoting Confucius. “Long time no see” was his trademark. Soon after Charlie Chan, “Long time no see” became a popular phrase in the real world with thanks to the popularity of these movies.

    Some scholars refer to America as a huge pot of stew. All kinds of culture are mixed in the stew together, and they change the color and taste of each other. American Chinese, though a minority ethnic(少数民族的成员) group in the United States, is also contributing some changes to the stew! Language is usually the first thing to be influenced in the mixed stew.

    You can have some other examples than adoptions（采用）from Chinese, such as pizza from Italian, susi from Japanese, and déjà vu from French etc. There is a long list! Americans do not just simply borrow something from others. They will modify it and make it their own, so you would not be surprised to find a tofu and peanut butter hamburger in a restaurant, or to buy a bottle of iced Chinese green tea with honey in a grocery store. Since Americans appreciate Chinese culture more and more nowadays, I believe more Chinese words will become American English in the future. In this way the American stew keeps adding richness and flavor.

    In the United States, when one becomes rich, he wants people to know it. And even if he does not become very rich, he wants people to think that he is. That is what "keeping up with the Joneses" is about. It is the story of someone who tried to look as rich as his neighbors.

    The expression was first used in 1913 by a young American called Arthur Momand. He told this story about himself. He began earning $ 125 a week at the age of 23. That was a lot of money in those days. He got married and moved with his wife to a very wealthy neighborhood. When he saw that rich people rode horses, Momand went horseback riding every day. When he saw that rich people had servants. Momand and his wife also hired a servant and gave big parties for their new neighbors.

    It was like a race, but one could never finish this race because one was always trying to keep up. The race ended for Momand and his wife when they could no longer pay for their new way of life. They had to move back to an apartment in New York City. Momand looked around him and noticed that many people do things just to keep up with rich lifestyle of their neighbors. He saw the funny side of it and started to write a series of short stories. He called it "Keeping up with the Joneses" because "Jones" is a very common name in the United States. "Keeping up with the Joneses" came to mean keeping up with rich lifestyle of the people around you. Momand's series appeared in different newspapers across the country for over 28 years.

    People never seem to get tired of keeping up with the Joneses. And there are "Joneses" in every city of the world. But one must get tired of trying to keep up with the Joneses because no matter what one does, Mr. Jones always seems to be ahead.

OSCAR THEATRE

    BOOKING­ in person. The Box Office is open Monday to Saturday, 10 am­8 pm.­ by post Stating the performance and choice of seats, enclosing a cheque, postal order, or your credit card details to Oscar Theatre Box Office, PO Box 220, Main street. All cheques should be made payable to Oscar Theatre. ­ by telephone

Ring 0844 847 2484 to reserve your tickets or to pay by credit card (Visa, MasterCard accepted). ­ on­line

    Complete the on­line booking form at www.oscartheatre.com.

    DISCOUNTS

    Saver: $2 off any seat booked any time in advance for performances from Monday to Thursday inclusive, and for all matinees(下午场). Savers are available for children up to 16 years old, over 60s and full­time students.

    Supersaver: half­price seats are available for people with disabilities and one companion. It is advisable to book in advance. There is a maximum of eight wheelchair spaces available and one wheelchair space will be held until one hour before the show (subject to availability).

    Standby: best available seats are on sale for $6 from one hour before the performance for people eligible(有资格的) for Saver and Supersaver discounts and thirty minutes before for all other customers.

    Group Bookings: there is a ten per cent discount for parties of twelve or more.

    Schools: school parties of ten or more can book $9 tickets in advance and will get every tenth ticket free.

    Please note: we are unable to exchange tickets or refund money unless a performance is cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances.

    All around the world, lawyers generate more hostility(敌视) than the members of any other profession-with the possible exception of journalism. But there are few places where clients have more grounds for complaint than America.

    During the decade before the economic crisis, spending on legal services in America grew twice as fast as inflation. The best lawyers made skyscrapers-full of money, tempting ever more students to pile into law schools. But most law graduates never get a big-firm job. Many of them instead become the kind of nuisance-lawsuit filer that makes the tort system a costly nightmare.

    There are many reasons for this. One is the excessive costs of a legal education. There is just one path for a lawyer in most American states: a four-year undergraduate degree in some unrelated subjects, then a three-year law degree at one of 200 law schools authorized by the American Bar Association and an expensive preparation for the bar exam. This leaves today's average law-school graduate with $100,000 of debt on top of undergraduate debts. Law-school debt means that they have to work extremely hard.

    Reforming the system would help both lawyers and their customers. Sensible ideas have been around for a long time, but the state-level bodies that govern the profession have been too conservative to implement(实施)them. One idea is to allow people to study law as an undergraduate degree. Another is to let students sit for the bar after only two years of law school. If the bar exam is truly a strict enough test for a would-be lawyer, those who can sit it earlier should be allowed to do so. Students who do not need the extra training could cut their debt mountain by a third. The other reason why costs are so high is the restrictive guild-like(行会) ownership structure of the business. Except in the District of Columbia, non-lawyers may not own any share of a law firm. This keeps fees high and innovation slow. There is pressure for change from within the profession, but opponents of change among the regulators insist that keeping outsiders out of a law firm isolates lawyers from the pressure to make money rather than serve clients ethically.

    In fact, allowing non-lawyers to own shares in law firms would reduce costs and improve services to customers, by encouraging law firms to use technology and to employ professional managers to focus on improving firms' efficiency. After all, other countries, such as Australia and Britain, have started liberalizing their legal professions. America should follow.

When we learn to drive, we need to learn basic skills such as how to switch on the engine, turn on the wipers, operate the brakes, etc. before we actually take to the road. Once the lower order operations and skills listed above have been automatized or at least routinized to the extent that we do not have to pay attention to them (by­pass Working Memory's attentional systems), we can actually be safe in the assumption that we can wholly focus on the higher order skills which will allow us to take the split seconds decisions that will prevent us from getting lost, clash with other cars, break the traffic laws while dealing with our children messing about in the back seats.

This is what the brain does, too, when learning languages. Because Working Memory has a very limited space available when performing any task, the brain has learnt to automatize lower order skills so that, by being performed "subconsciously" they free up cognitive(认知)space. So, for instance, if I am an advanced speaker who has routinized accurate pronunciation, grammar and syntax to a fairly high degree, I will be able to devote more conscious attention (Working Memory space) to the message I want to put across. On the other hand, if I still struggle with pronunciation, word order, irregular verb forms and tenses most of my attention will be taken up by the mechanics of what I want to say, rather than the meaning; this will slow me down and limit my ability to think through what I want to say due to cognitive overload.

In language teaching this important principle translates as follows: in order to enable our students to focus on the higher order skills involved in comprehension and production we need to ensure that the lower­order ones have been acquired or performance will be reduced.

The automobile industry is spending billions on self-driving cars, but what if we quite like driving? 

One holiday a few years ago, I spent hours being transported on trains, buses and planes. I read a novel for a while, then stared out the window, in a black mood. I was turned into goods, being shifted from one location to another. Then, finally, came the exciting section of the holiday when I hired a car.

My wife Jocasta and I followed the positioning system, turning right, then right again, and found ourselves in a small town. I spoke to the positioning system, "We don't want to be here; we want the highway." Then it instructed me to turn right again and again. With every turn, the street narrowed. The walls were so close that I had to hold my breath.

Another car appeared, coming towards us from the opposite direction. The driver signaled, telling me I had to make way. But how? I didn't have the courage to back up along the impossibly narrow passage. Soon some locals came to help. One lady stood at the back of the vehicle, waving me on. She continued making "this way, this way" movements with her arms. In an act of blind trust, instructions, creeping (小心行进) backwards and forwards. Remarkably, it worked. I completed my turn into the side street. The other car passed and the driver gave me a grateful wave. Then I followed the lady's suggestion and—finally—saw the highway.

My hands were shaking. I breathed in and out. Jocasta turned to me. "You're my hero, "she said. I looked at her, expecting a shadow of a teasing (嘲笑的) smile, but can find none. "You're my hero," she repeated. "I mean it. You did a really good job." Finally, I managed to steady my nerves. Then we set off again and the car sped smoothly away. Who would exchange all this for a self-driving car?