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| Visit the home page of a Professor of Liberal Arts and read some FREE lectures. Good for building a stronger and more flexible vocabulary and you can get a college education, too. www.nova.edu/~alford |
| www.wildperuadventures.com see the fun website that my friend Chachi set up... See Peru like a local! |
| Visit a tour of TALK School The entire tour is informal and it was created by students and teachers. You can make the same for your students by using oocities.com... click HERE for INSTRUCTIONS |
| 365 Lessons (A lesson for each day of the year CLICK here ...lessons |
| August 15 Death The lesson evolved from a TV series that appeared on HBO early in 2001: "Six Feet Under". Where is joe? He's six feet under. (slang, short form) extended form: His body is six feet under the surface of the earth. |
| Lesson Plan for August 15 Quotation: Where is Joe? "He's in a better place." Write this on the board: How can you avoid saying "He's dead?" |
| ADVANCED LANGUAGE: Euphemisms about Death He _____________ the farm. He __________ the bucket He's pushing _______ daisies. He passed _______ He crossed ______ last night. He is no longer ______ us. He's ______ the angels now. You can fill in the blanks above with these words over on with up away bought kicked daisies = small flowers, yellow center, white petals, usually associated with spring and happiness, a new beginning. The answers are below. This is a euphemism. eu = good, phem = speaking, from Greek) Almost every US person knows five or six ways to avoid saying "dead" or "he died" ... |
| Visit the home page of a Professor of Liberal Arts and read some FREE lectures. Good for building a stronger and more flexible vocabulary and you can get a college education, too. www.nova.edu/~alford |
| FIND THE ERRORS EXERCISE: Create a conversation about a funeral home or a situation surrounding death. For each of these conversations, we need DESCRIPTION of the place A small funeral home (funeral parlor) in Los Angeles (see the HBO Page for details). It is 9 a.m, the funeral will start at 10:30 am. DESCRIPTION of the people Who is in the funeral home? Five THINGS casket dust fresh flowers Some people stand up to say something nice about the dead person (they give a eulogy) eu = good logos = words light is shining through a window. Soft organ music is playing. Five Verbs or Actions mourn, pray eulogize THE SITUATION or PROBLEM There are only two people sitting in the room to mourn the passing of the dead person. Describe the dead person. What do the people say about him? THE DIALOG Write a dialog between the funeral director and one of the people who is mourning. Director: How did you know the deceased? Man: Oooh. I worked with him. Director: Would you like to say something about his life? Man: Well, I didn't know him very well. I didn't even know that he owned a gun. (continue...) |
You can get more summaries of the stories at http://www.hbo.com/sixfeetunder/cmp/insiders_guide.html This is a summary of the first episode Written and directed by Alan Ball Los Angeles, Christmas Eve, Nathaniel Fisher, owner of the Fisher and Sons Funeral Home, is killed when a municipal bus broadsides his new hearse. The tragedy casts a pall on the holiday homecoming of son Nate (who works for an organic food co-op in Seattle), as he must not only deal with the death of a father, but the fragile egos of mother Ruth (who has been having a secret affair with her hairdresser, Hiram), brother David (a closet homosexual seeing a black policeman named Keith), and a sister Claire (a rebellious high-schooler who receives the bad news after dropping crystal meth with new boyfriend Gabe). The only good thing to happen to Nate is Brenda, a passionate women he met on the plane, just before learning of his father's death. At home, David eschews the talents of his young mortician, Fredrico, to personally undo the damage of his dad's accident. The ensuing funeral leaves the family's deepest emotions exposed, and calls into question some of our more absurd rites of passage. At the gravesite, David is not amused by the advances of Matthew Gilardi of Kroehner Service Corporation, a funeral- home conglomerate looking to buy out the Fishers business. As for senior Nathaniel, he may have been laid to rest- but has plenty left to reveal to his family. Also Starring: Garrison Hershberger as Matthew Gilardi Dina Waters as chatty mourner Sharon Madden as chatty mourner Hayden Tank as young Nate Maximillian Orion Kesmodel as young david Dennis Anderson as market clerk Harper Roisman as eldery man Dennis J. Lav as morgue attendent Audrey Gelfand as crying sicilian mother Jennifer Griffin as crying sicilain daughter |
| http://www.hbo.com/sixfeetunder/cmp/show_music.html The show's opening music has an eerie, mysterious sound. Here are some of the sounds I heard. A woodwind instrument The main instrument is an oboe or clarinet. It has a haunting, hollow sound that vibrates. Bells several times bells appear in the soundtrack. They sound like bells that mourners shake in Asia, since the tones are discordant, unharmonious. The sounds clash with each other. I imagine a scene with brightly-clad people walking down a street, smoke coming out of an urn, small children throwing flower petals in front of the procession. Three men are shaking small bells to scare away evil spirits and the group brings the body to a pile of wood. Then the funeral pyre is lit. A hoot Owls are creatures of the night. An instrument imitates the hoot of an owl. The owl has curved talons and a curved beak. It flies almost noiselessly and snatches a mouse from the ground. It eats the mouse by tearing the flesh and crushing the life out of the mouse. The weird melody It sounds like a troll or dwarf, maybe a leprechaun, who is jumping behind trees, wtaching us but we don't notice him. we hear some movements but he's too fast. Eyes follow us as we walk through the forest -- it's daytime but the forest is tall and dark and we can hear animals (or fairies? witches? goblins?) behind us or on the side, running between and behind the tree trunks. One student thought that the melody was cheerful, upbeat and happy... but then the melody is interrupted by the clanging clashing bells. Work with your teacher -- what words are unfamiliar? Because many of these words are not used a lot in other situations, fthere are special associations with death -- especially in the minds of people who come from the UK and USA. The US culture is linked strongly with the Victorian age, which had superestitions. Victorian people believed that you needed to put bells inside the coffin in case the spirit returned to the body and then couldn't get out. "There were scratches on the inside of the lid of the coffin!" When I hear that music, a tingle goes up my spine. I get goose bumps (in Spanish it's "chicken skin") |
| Additional work on the Internet Go to the HBO web site www.hbo.com/sixfeetunder and listen to the music, watch the video clips, and then write your impressions of the show. do you feel a t______ up your spine? |
| ANSWER: A tingle up your spine |
| ADVANCED LANGUAGE: Euphemisms about Death He ___bought__________ the farm. He ___kicked_______ the bucket He's pushing __up_____ daisies. He passed ___away____ he passed on He crossed __over____ last night. He is no longer __with____ us. He's __with____ the angels now. You can fill in the blanks above with these words over on with up away bought kicked daisies = small flowers, yellow center, white petals, usually associated with spring and happiness, a new beginning. The answers are below. This is a euphemism. eu = good, phem = speaking, from Greek) Almost every US person knows five or six ways to avoid saying "dead" or "he died" ... |
| Here is a list of words that are useful when describing a situation with death. All of these images were found in the opening credits or the beginning of the HBO TV series called "Six Feet Under". These are visual references to death. There is a solitary bird in the sky, then the camera moves down and shows a solitary tree on the green horizon. Something unknown is over the horizon. Two people are in front of the camera, holding hands, but something pulls them apart. they try to clasp their hands firmly but they can't stay together. The image fades into the mist and ... You see a tag on the toe of a corpse. The body is traveling on a cart with wheels. the wheels are shaking, vibrating, probably squeaking as the cart rolls down the hall toward a white light. The camera shows flowers, but they are slowly dying. tehy are turnign brown and wilting. (drooping, falling down. the life is draining out of them.) The embalming fluid (which replaces the blood and other fluids inthe body) drains out of the container. You can see the level slowly dropping. The fluid is pale green, eerie, unnatural, cool, let's not get over-excited. The emblamer doesn't wash his hands. He dips his hands in soap and then rubs them vertically together. You see a crow or a raven, which reminds you about Edgar Allen Poe's poem about "Nevermore!" Typical words: morose, melancholy, depressing, dark, ominous, These are linked with death. |
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| Don't remind me that someone died! We call the place where the mortician works "a funeral home" or a "funeral parlor" He's the funeral home director. (Don't say "merchant of death.") Don't make me feel uncomfortable. Open casket or closed casket? (Don't say, "Do you want to see the body?") The flowers next to the casket are always fresh, a symbol of a new beginning. |
| The emblamer wears a white coat. He repairs damage to the body and makes the body look better than it has in 40 years. |
| Which words below can you put in the blanks? Do you want time alone with the _______ He is ______ departed deceased gone no more an empty vessel enjoying his well-deserved eternal rest. There are other ways to say "He died"... He perished He had a quick exit. He departed quickly The end was brief He went in his sleep. (while sleeping) He left us in his sleep. His spirit is still with us. His spirit departed last night. |
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| <<<< What are the images that you see here? These are comical commercials that HBO created for the series. you can view them at http://www.hbo.com/sixfeetunder/cmp/video.html |
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