Colloquial terms
crazy and mad: colloquial, or slang, terms meaning mentally unbalanced. Crazy is the colloquial word for insane in US English, but it is used worldwide. In UK English, mad is the colloquial word for insane, but in US English, mad means angry.
deranged: insane
insane: affected by a mental illness. Insane is used in general conversation, but is not a technical term for psychological diagnosis.
lunatic: a person afflicted by mental illness. Historically, people with mental disorders were thought to be affected by the phases of the moon (luna means moon in Latin).
retarded: used as a derogatory term for people with learning difficulties or brain damage.
Exercise B
Set for pairwork discussion. Check that students understand the vocabulary shown in the headlines (crazies, schizophrenic, stabbing, frenzy, autistic, genius, scam, suicide pact). Tell students to bear in mind the points they have just discussed. Feed back with the whole class.
Answers Possible answers:
A The stereotype is of people with mental illness committing violent crimes. The headline evokes images of a crowd of savages attacking defenceless children. Insanity is popularly linked with arson, and research has shown that it is the crime most frequently committed by psychiatric patients. The word ‘crazies’ is a colloquial noun, formed from the adjective ‘crazy’ and then made plural.
B The stereotype of a schizophrenic committing murder, particularly his/her mother. The knife is popular in films as the preferred weapon of an insane person. The film Psycho is an example of the confusion between schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder and psychotic episodes. Psycho (adj and n) is a colloquial word for insane or a person who is mentally ill.
C The autistic genius stereotype comes from the factual relationship between autism and exceptional talent (savant syndrome). 10% of people with autism possess an unusual ability in art, music or mathematics. This stereotype is combined with the image of the antisocial personality committing intellectually complex crimes. In 2001, Gary MacKinnon, a Scottish computer enthusiast with a form of autism, hacked into confidential US Pentagon files.
D The depressed adolescent has been a popular stereotype throughout history. The link between
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depression and suicide is, however, factual. Since the advent of the Internet and social networking sites, for example, teenagers have taken part in online suicide pacts.
Exercise C
Set for pairwork. You may wish to divide the work up between different pairs. For question 4 (useful grammatical information), tell students to look out for words that can have the same form when used as a noun or verb, nouns that can be only singular or only plural, nouns that change their meaning when used as U or C, etc.
Feed back, building up the table in the Answers section on the board.
Answers Model answers:
See table on next page. Exercise D
Set for individual work and pairwork checking. Make sure students understand that they should find a verb in column 2 with a similar meaning to one of the verbs in column 1.
Feed back with the whole class, discussing the extent to which the verbs are exact synonyms, and if not, identifying any differences in meaning.
Answers
Model answers: Verb
exploit link manifest Noun expulsion Verb
characterize characteristic define expel
link
lose touch – (with)
eliminate connect manifestation display
perpetuate perpetuation continue propagate propagation spread vary
variation, variety
Exercise E
This is an exercise in paraphrasing based on word and sentence level techniques. As well as finding their own synonyms from memory and using the synonyms already discussed in Exercises C and D, students will use noun phrases in place of verb phrases as a technique in paraphrasing. Students should also make passive sentences wherever they can.
differ Noun definition elimination
exploitation take advantage – of
connection
be detached detachment (from)
display
continuation spread
difference
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