It’s the season to think about the crook of your elbow, something most of us don’t do too much. The crook of your elbow is the inside curve of your elbow. It is a body part that requires little care and is almost self-cleaning, and that is one of the reasons we give it so little thought. Except during flu season. Fill in the blanks with common prepositions: around / during / in / into / of/ off / on.
Occasionally, we use the crooks of our elbows to cry .
Sometimes, we use our elbow crooks to lie our heads .
Some guys use their crooks to make sure their biceps go the length their upper arms.
And women need their elbow crooks to carry designer handbags and show their labels.
Elbow crooks are handy when you want to put a chokehold somebody.
Or support a newborn baby’s head your arms.
And the crooks of our elbows, of course, are famous for carrying sleeping puppies .
Some people tattoo little reminders to themselves the crooks of their elbows.
Others use their crooks for support
stretching exercises.
But that’s about it.
Except for flu season.
You already know that you shouldn’t sneeze or cough into the air.
And we all know that we don’t always have a tissue within reach to cover our mouths and noses when we need to sneeze or cough.
So what do we do if we have an uncontrollable urge to sneeze or cough?
We have to make a split-second decision.
You cough or sneeze into the crook of your elbow, of course!
That’s what elbow crooks are for, and you have two of them.
It’s called respiratory etiquette.
Emergency sneezing or coughing into arm crooks generally contain the spread of germs.
It does not eliminate all risks, but it is the best tactic known to mankind.
Think about it; your crooks are pretty much untouched.
You don’t use your crooks to shake hands, hand someone a pencil, open a door or turn on a faucet that somebody else is going to touch.
When you let a sneeze or cough loose in the air, its bacteria can stay alive for up to 45 minutes.
If you sneeze or cough on a hard surface such as a table or desk, a flu virus can survive for 24 hours.
Infectious flu viruses only survive on human tissue for 15 minutes, but by that time you have sneezed or coughed again.
Now you know what you should do and how to do it.
The next step is avoiding all people who are not using the crooks of their elbows to contain their germs.
We are introducing the category, Self-Study, to our content as a way to broaden the challenges in this blog. Self-study is generally about learning to motivate yourself and taking responsibility for your own education, much needed skills in any walk of life. As for learning and improving on a second language, self-study is a perfect way to further develop your reading comprehension and vocabulary, which will naturally add to any associated language abilities. As our subject material is usually an eclectic mix of topics, we hope that Self-Study will enrich and empower you with new language skills. Please feel free to make any comments or contributions in the spaces below the topics.
The word cliffhanger comes from cliffs. Duh. Cliffs are vertical, or nearly vertical, rocks that have been formed by erosion and weathering. There are lots of famous cliffs, but the first ones that come to my mind are the White Cliffs of Dover, probably because there was a popular World War II song about them that was part of my childhood, and also because they are on the historical English coastline.
When one thinks of cliffhangers, England and its gothic novels always come to mind. Cliffhangers are the kind of story, book or movie that uses suspense either at the end of an episode or a scene. A good example was the way the final episode of Game of Thrones, season 5, was done. Jon Snow was dead. Or was he? Those of us who sweated it out until season 6 was aired were never really sure. The writers used old-fashioned melodrama, suspense and uncertainty, and the audience was left as if hanging from a cliff in a state of tension and apprehension. And that’s a true cliffhanger.
This part of the blog will not be able to offer any nail-biting cliffhangers, but it will have classes in series, and I hope they will be interesting enough that you will want to come back and read what happens next, even if you don’t lose sleep anticipating the next chapter. Enjoy.
