Guessing the meaning of unknown words
1.
Supply the meaning of the nonsense word “speg” in the following sentences:
*ntary benefit, maternity grant and speg and vitamin tokens. (This has recent…
*relatively cheap, on tides of free speg and orange juice, but good cloth in…
*nimals give us painlessly, such as speg and eggs. The proposition that meat…
*consisting in large part of eggs, speg, cheese or other speg products is hi…
*art of eggs, speg, cheese or other speg products is high in protein. Lentils…
*ee a bus stopped, or near a parked speg float or mobile shop. Watch out for…
the nonsense word SPEG stands for =…………………………………………………………………….
2. A. In the following sentences, the word in italics is a nonsense word that does not exist in English. Look at the sentence
carefully and try to guess its meaning. Match each word with another nonsense word that has the same meaning, and
then give a French equivalent for each pair. (Workbook - Old Headway Upper Intermediate by John and Liz Soars –
OUP – 1987)
After a storrup day at work, it is wonderful to return to the calm of my house in the country.
If I had a tragoon, I could easily cut that wood to burn in winter.
It was a cold, grumfit November day. Clouds covered the sky, and all she wanted to do was get home to a warm fire.
He huckled her hand affectionately, and told her he would love her forever.
I heard a histit today that you and Sheila are going to get married. Is it true?
The party was awful. A pawdry old man bored me to death for two hours telling me how depressed and miserable he was.
The bank robber looked very menacing, and no-one dared approach him. He had a zooly in one hand and a revolver in the
other.
Sorry about the mess. The office is a bit glaimy at the moment. There’s so much to do and no time to do it.
Wait a minute. I can’t walk. I’ve got a scrummy in my shoe.
Mag a lemon, add the juice to the mixture, and keep it in the fridge for two hours.
There is a bagshot going round that there will be a general election soon, but most people don’t believe it.
It’s not a very nice beach, actually. There isn’t much sand. Most of it is covered in blotchermers.
Storrup means the same as =…………………………… and is translated in French by =……………………………………
B. Here are the real English words to replace the nonsense words from the exercise above. If you don’t know their
meaning, look them up in the dictionary and match them to the above meanings:
dreary [Oo Ian] – a rumour [Oo Susan]– to squeeze [Jean]– hectic [Oo Fred]– an axe [Ann]– a pebble [Fred]
3.
A. devise a test for your classmates: find a short text in your coursebook and replace 10 words in it with the following
nonsense words. Use the same nonsense word for all the instances of the same original word (if you decide to replace the
verb “repeat” with “det”, replace all the forms of this verb with “det”, i.e. “repeated” should become “deted”:
jamba – cassy – pindrus – opit – foogle – halory – wut – det(ed) – koofy – swoshi
B. give the text with the nonsense words to a classmate and ask them to try to fill the following chart:
WORD
jamba
cassy
Etc…
PART OF SPEECH(*) TRANSLATION IN FRENCH
(*) is it a verb, a noun, a pronoun, an adjective, an adverb, an article, … ?
C. correct your classmate’s answers.
SYNONYM(S)