English for everyone

An English schoolteacher was looking for rooms in Switzerland. She called upon the local schoolmaster to help her find an apartment that would be suitable. Such rooms were found, and she returned to London for her belongings. She remembered that she had not noticed a bathroom, or as she called it, “a water closet.” She wrote to the schoolmaster and asked if there as a “W.C.” in or near the apartment.
The schoolmaster, not knowing the English expression was puzzled by the “W.C.”, never dreaming that she was talking about a bathroom. He finally sought advice from the parish priest. They concluded that she must mean a Wayside Chapel. The lady received the following letter a few days later:
Dear Madam,
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This poem is composed by taking one line from the works of 38 different English poets. How many can you identify?

THE POEM OF POEMS
Why all this toil for triumphs of an hour?
Life’s a short summer-man a flower
By turn we catch the vital breath and die,
The cradle and the tomb, alas! So nigh.
To be is better far than not to be,
All man’s life me seems a tragedy,
For light cares speak when mighty griefs are dumb
The bottom is but shallow whence they come
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On War and Peace

I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war. Albert Einstein — Я не только пацифист, но воинствующий пацифист. Я готов бороться за мир. Ничто не закончится войной, если люди сами откажутся идти на войну. Альберт Эйнштейн

If there is another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans. Otto von Bismarck — Если в Европе будет еще одна война, то она произойдет из-за какой-нибудь проклятой глупой вещи на Балканах. Отто фон Бисмарк

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it. Dwight D. Eisenhower — Я думаю, что люди так сильно хотят мира, что в один из этих дней правительству было бы лучше отступить и позволить им иметь его. Дуайт Д. Эйзенхауэр
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Kevin Costner in the film The Bodyguard

Have you seen Kevin Costner in the film The Bodyguard? His character in the film, Frank Farmer, is a professional bodyguard who got his training in the Secret Service. Before he hired himself to protect Rachel Marron (Whitney Huston) he had worked for President Reagan. He still blames himself for the fact that Ronald Reagan got shot.
Altogether, four American presidents have been assassinated and attempts have been made on the lives of others. The first president to be killed was Abraham Lincoln. He was shot while attending the theatre in Washington. James Garfield was shot a few months after his inauguration and died at the age of forty-nine. William McKinley was killed in Buffalo, New York in 1901. John Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas in 1963.
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When in Britain

Visitors to Britain are often surprised by the strange behaviour of its inhabitants. The British like forming queues. They queue up when waiting for a bus, theatre tickets, in shops… A well-known writer George Mikes, a Hungarian by birth, joked: ‘An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one’.
So one of the worst mistakes is to get on a bus without waiting your turn. The British are very sensitive to such behaviour and they may get really annoyed with queue-jumpers -people who don’t wait their turn in the queue.
Drivers in cars can become quite aggressive if they think you are jumping the queue in a traffic jam. Newspapers often publish angry articles about people who pay money to bypass a hospital waiting list in order to get an operation more quickly.
The British, especially the English, are more reserved than the people of many other countries. They don’t like to show their emotions. They usually don’t easily get into conversation with strangers. They don’t like personal questions (for example, how much money they earn or about their family life). They take more time to make friends. They would like to know you better before they ask you home. So don’t be upset if your English friends don’t invite you home. It doesn’t mean they don’t like you!
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Maisie Allen’s lips stretched in a tight little smile of satisfaction as she surveyed the poky suburban house with its prim lace curtains. So this was what Mark had come to after thirty years! The godlike Mark had come to this in the end!
It was the end, of course. The unspecified female relative who had written to Maisie in a crabbed and elderly hand had made that perfectly clear. Mark had at most a few more months to live, and he wanted to see his old friend Maisie Allen before he died; that was the gist of the letter which Maisie now fingered almost lovingly with her tight black glove.
The triumph of it! Mark, who had once thought that he owned the world, that he owned Maisie and could demand of her anything he liked: Mark, who now lay dying in this squalid street with only some aged cousin to look after him. Not even a wife or a family to show for all that proud young strength! A little secret smile hovered round Maisie’s mouth as she rang the bell.
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One wise man said that no man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. True, isn’t it? However, we sometimes realise, to our great astonishment, that the knowledge of the language is not enough. Every country has its customs. Different nations can behave differently in the same situations. Let’s be polite travellers. Let’s respect the customs of the country we are in. Let’s not forget the proverb: “When in Rome do as the Romans do.»
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