Self-Improvement Tip # 1: Magnanimous Loser

Photo Courtesy of sxc.hu

What a title… What do you think do I really know about self-improvement?

Never mind though.

Before I proceed, I want to make a disclaimer first — that when it comes to giving self-improvement advice, I’m neither a professional nor an expert. In short, follow this tip at your own risk. There is something I am certain though, that I’m a trying hard who is persistently adding usefulness to my blog entries because of their continuous sheer lack of it.

But wait! Have I not named my blog Kwaderno, the Filipino term for notebook? Well, that’s because I want to take down as much lessons and notes as I can while taking this journey I’m temporarily calling K-O TRAVEL.

So, this is more of a for-me-tip than for-you-tip.

Tip 1. Improve Your Vocabulary

Through the course of my initial voyage, I met two excellent writers. The first one was my Editor-In-Chief in a publication and the other one was a former colleague in a not so humane company. They had something in common, an attitude that I think was directly proportional to their verbal skills and rhetoric. They were calling their USP, laptop, and mugs with names — as if these were pets with birth certificates. Weird, don’t you think so? Perhaps yes, unusually bizarre. Admirable, nonetheless.

I told myself, “That is just so cool. Why should I not do the same for my things, too?”

I began with my pen. “From now on, I’m calling you magnanimous loser,” I once said while raising my new Pilot pen, recently bought from a supermarket near my boarding house.

Magnanimous was a term I encountered while reading an article. I couldn’t easily remember and use it inspite of my great efforts to repeatedly commit it to my long-term memory. Hence, to awaken my hippocampus and temporal lobes, I had attached magnanimous to my ball pen. In the absence, however, of another noun for magnanimous to correctly describe, I remained uncomfortable, if not totally incapable of, using it in my writings. I therefore added to it the word loser, the term magnanimous objectively illustrated in the same article it was written. That was how magnanimous loser pen came to existence.

I felt an overwhelming sense of happiness: little smile, forceful shout — which were already awesomely intense for a sick writer like me.

“Whoo! Whee! I could now be great, be an emperor like Julius Caesar, be a founding father like Abraham Lincoln, or be a national hero like Jose Rizal. I named a pen of my own, a weapon sharper and mightier than a double-edged sword.”

Not long after, magnanimous loser ran out of ink. That was even before I could conquer the whole of Europe, establish a super power country in the West, or receive a heroic recognition from my peers. I didn’t get so sad though, but still, I delivered a eulogy.

During the burial, I was the only one present. No one could hear my melodramatic speech, because everything was just in my head: “Ei, magnanimous, you might have lasted only for a month, but you left me important lessons in life. First, that losers can still be noble. Second, that I could be one word richer than before by attaching new vocabulary to my personal belongings. I shall never forget these values. Goodbye.”

Then, I threw it into the trash can.

The following day, I bought a pair of shoes. “Hello guys! You, left footwear, I’m calling you ‘ennui’, and you, right footwear, I’m calling you ‘boredom’. You’re twins – synonymous — always remember that. Don’t fight, be together at all times. Bring me to nice places where words are happiness and vocabularies are temporary refuge from sadness.”

Would you like to take a guess of where they’ve brought me so far?#

When do you take lunch, supper, and dinner?

I was sitting at my workstation. Bored. Numb. And thirsty (there’s no water at the pantry). A question popped up into my mind: “What makes supper and dinner different from one another when, in fact, they are used interchangeably?” Here’s a rather interesting find.

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“Could you explain the difference between lunch, supper and dinner?”

By

Gareth Rees

“The expressions do relate to the time of day that you eat the meal and the type of food and the size of the meal. That’s why it can get confusing.

First of all, breakfast. This is simplest; it’s the first meal of the day in the morning.

In the middle of the day, you might have lunch or dinner. Lunch sounds more informal or more typical, particularly for people who are working.

In the evening, you might have dinner or supper. I think that people who have a quick lunch in the middle of the day will say they have dinner in the evening and this dinner will be a good meal.

A supper is usually a light meal and is probably had after a larger dinner has been had in the middle of the day.

Confused? Well most people see a dinner as a more complete meal. A common lunch in England is a sandwich, but dinner might include soup, meat with vegetables, and then a dessert like apple pie and ice cream. So, dinner is really the main meal and people might have it in the middle of the day or in the evening. Lunch and supper are both light kinds of meal. Lunch is in the middle of the day, supper is in the evening.

Now I mentioned there are some other meals. We talked about breakfast. Two more words that you could add to your list are brunch and tea. Brunch is a mixture of breakfast and lunch, as you can tell by the sound of the word: ‘brunch’. And people usually have brunch as a replacement for both lunch and breakfast. Brunch is usually had at about 11 o’clock.

And the final word is tea. Now of course this is a drink, like tea and coffee, but it can also be a light evening meal. I think this word is often used in families, particularly with their children. “It’s tea time”, “It’s time for tea!” This means their small evening meal.

To finish, it is of course unusual to have breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, tea and supper all in one day. But let me tell you, not impossible. And from that comment you’ll understand that I have the ideal physique and dietary habits for radio and the internet and not for TV.”

Gareth Rees has been an English language teacher and teacher trainer for over 10 years. He is currently a lecturer at London Metropolitan University and is an author of different books for English Language.

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Now, I know.

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