Excuse me. What time is it please?	It's exactly eight o'clock. or It's eight.
	Excuse me. Do you have the time please?	It's half past twelve. or It's twelve thirty.
	Excuse me. Could you tell me the time please?	It's about half past eleven. or It's about eleven thirty.

Test It

We use the Present Simple tense to talk about regular or permanent actions.

In the third person (he, she, it) form, the verb takes an s. For example:-

Things Mr Bean does every Monday morning.

		Every Monday Mr Bean wakes up at 6.00 am.
		He gets up at 6.15 am,
		and goes to the bathroom.
		He usually has a shower,
		then he has a shave and brushes his teeth.
		He eats breakfast at about 7.00 am.
		After breakfast he reads the newspaper.
		At 7.30 am he goes to work.

1. Google offers its employees free lunch.
2. Google's employees get free haircuts.
3. Google receives more than 1000 resumes a day.
4. Google can be queried in 36 languages (2007).
5. Google uses over 10,000 networked computers to crawl the web.
6. Google has 2007 surpassed Microsoft as the world's most-visited site.
7. Google have won 2007 most powerful brand by a British research company.
8. Google staffs are known as Googlers.
9. The founders of Google didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface,      that’s one of the main reasons why the home page is so bare.
10. The name "Google" comes from a spelling mistake, the founders wanted to write "Googol".
11. Google comes from the word googol, which is 1 followed by a hundred zeros?
12. Google founders launched their search site in 1998.
13. The Google function "I feel lucky" is nearly never used, well compared to the high number of users?
14. The top search words in Google where September 19th, 2005 "Hurricane Rita".
15. Google receives about 200 million search queries each day. More than half of which come from outside the United States . During the heaviest traffic more than 2,000 search queries are answered each second.

____________ _________ _________ _________ _________ __

Slang -- however you define it -- is a term that conveniently designates words and phrases diverging markedly in social ambiance, use, and style from those of the standard lexicon. Public and professional interest in slang has never been greater than it is today. The purpose of this and succeeding volumes is, through the use of established historical methods, to shed fresh light on the slang element in American English and, by so doing, to better our understanding of American English as a whole.

As a rough-and-ready label for an abstraction that, as our epigraphs suggest, encourages as much appreciation as dispraise, slang has frequently inspired discordant, sometimes antagonistic, definitions. The public employs the term as a simple synonym for a subjectively "bad" English, and it may well be that the word most often appears in the parental admonition "Don't use slang!" For close to two and a half centuries popular definitions of slang have embraced every variety of unconventional or unfamiliar English, from the lingo of felons to the language of philosophers. Yet no commonly accepted definition of slang has won much favor among linguists, who mostly regard the boundaries between slang and other levels of discourse as too insubstantial for analysis. And one can hardly blame them. For it is true that, taken together, slang and its associated epithets argot and cant are in practice a terminological jumble, each frequently laden with negative overtones and each one ready to serve as a synonym of the others. Yet differing interpretations of the word slang do not come about because it designates an exterior phenomenon of ineffable or elusive qualities; they arise instead because the interpreters -- dictionary makers, schoolteachers, and arbiters of diction -- differ in their preconceptions about language, view language from varying angles, and examine it for very different purposes. Items as dissimilar as snack bar, ain't, gentrification, sandwich, bikini, redcoat, date rape, motel, and wuss have now and again been cited as slang or former slang by various commentators, as has the interjectional say! ("Oh, say, can you see by the dawn's early light...?"), a claim that, lumped with all the others, leaves the useful word slang with scarcely any meaning at all.

In deriving a definition of slang so as to limit the scope of the present work and to keep its contents as much of a piece as possible, we have tried to work within a judicious tradition established over the past hundred years by W. D. Whitney¹, James A. H. Murray, Henry Bradley, and others -- lexicographers whose judgments rested upon a meticulous consideration of actual usage, which in lexicography is the only convincing evidence there is. We reject the practice that attaches the name of "slang" to whatever is new or popular in the way of language.

In this dictionary slang is conceived of in a rather limited way as a social and stylistic subset of the larger informal vocabulary of U.S. English. Slang may thus be briefly defined:

But a definition of slang that confines itself to stylistic traits such as these will necessarily remain inadequate. Slang has a vital social dimension as well: it turns up especially in the derisive speech play of youthful, raffish, or undignified persons and groups; and partly owing to this and partly because of the unconventional images slang often evokes, the use of slang often carries with it striking overtones of impertinence or irreverence, especially for idealized values and attitudes within the prevailing culture. Often too, the use of slang suggests, as standard speech cannot, an intimate familiarity with a referential object or idea (compare, for example, the difference between professional dancer and hoofer, wait tables and sling hash, prison and the joint, beer and suds, intellectual and wonk).

The use of slang also suggests something about the slangster's orientation to the interlocutor. It implies that the other person identifies fully with the speaker's attitudes. Thus, the English critic Walter Raleigh argued in the 1920's that "the strong vivid slang word cannot be counted on to do its work. It sets the hearer thinking, not on the subject of my speech, but on such irrelevant questions as the nature of my past education and the company I keep."²

Our abbreviated characterization of slang suggests something too about its chief rhetorical effect: the use of slang undermines the dignity of verbal exchange and charges discourse with an unrefined and often aggressive informality. It pops the balloon of pretence. There is often a raw vitality in slang, a ribald sense of humor and a flip self-confidence; there is also very often locker-room crudity and toughness, a tawdry sensibility. Whether slang's undignified tone communicates abrasive disrespect or a down-to-earth egalitarianism depends upon one's point of view. A trite misconception has it that the "nature of slang" is to assail dignity or taste or to "prove" that one somehow "belongs"; the truth is simply that, no matter what else the label is attached to, any word or phrase producing these particular effects is automatically classified as slang.

In fact, a truly unexpurgated collection of slang reminds us that the world of discourse, like the world of sense, is savage as well as sublime. For slang, romanticized as "the poetry of everyday life," has a regrettable side too, a side often stupidly coarse and provocative. The cultural focus of slang in Britain, America, Australia, and elsewhere as an adversary of dignity and taste has always inclined toward the ignoble. Certain subjects of enduring interest have been especially productive of English-language slang: physical sexuality; bodily functions; intoxication by liquor or drugs; sudden, energetic, or violent actions of various kinds; money; death; deception; criminal activity; weakness of mind or character; positive or sharply negative evaluations of people and things; and the derisive or contemptuous categorization of people of differing classes and groups -- racial, ethnic, sexual, regional, socioeconomic, occupational.

John Farmer and William Ernest Henley's Slang and Its Analogues, compiled in England mainly before 1890, is notable for its extensive lists of nonstandard synonyms for sex and alcohol. The Australians Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, discussing the current state of affairs in the Antipodes, declare flatly that "the degree of synonymy in the vocabulary for genitalia and copulation has no parallel elsewhere in the English lexicon."³ Stuart Flexner and others have averred that the word having the most slang synonyms is probably drunk. We believe drunk comes in second to the sexual terms, and does so throughout the English-speaking world.

Yet those who might accept a sketch of the national character based on slang alone would do well to remember that that portrayal is only a caricature, which bears as much resemblance to everyday life as do the stories in underground comix or the lyrics of gangsta rap. An opposing picture of the real world could as well be evoked by reflecting upon the rich English vocabulary of faith and philanthropy. However, such a rendering would be no more accurate, though admittedly more reassuring.

We can see that slang varies in important ways from other modes of language and levels of discourse. While its specific characteristics vis-à-vis those of nonstandard and colloquial language, as well as those of dialect and jargon, will be discussed later (see Slang Distinguished From Other Levels of Discourse, p. xiv), we should add here that slang differs too from idiosyncratic wordplay and other nonce figuration in that it maintains a currency independent of its creator, the individual writer or speaker. And it is not inappropriate to point out here, in anticipation of a fuller discussion, that slang differs broadly from dialect (a regional or social variety of speech) and jargon (a vocabulary of technical terms). Persons who naturally speak the same dialect (Northern American English or Hispanic American English, for example) necessarily share a similar regional or cultural background. Those who share a jargon (like electricians, surgeons, executives, quilt makers, economists, fighter pilots, and lawyers) share training or expertise. But a shared slang is more likely to suggest mutually held antiestablishment attitudes, especially a sharpened disdain for convention or pretence

Describing people's features
	eyes - right eye | left eye	nose left nostril | right nostril	mouth upper lip | lower lip	ears - right ear | left ear

Appearances

General
beautiful (women only)	handsome (men only)	pretty (girls only)	good looking (men/women/boys)	ugly (men and women)
Halle Berry is a very beautiful woman.	Hugh Jackman is a very handsome man.	Here is a pretty girl.	David and Victoria Beckham are a good looking couple.	Quasimodo is quite ugly.
attractive (men, women, boys or girls)
Halle Berry, Hugh Jackman, David Beckham and Victoria Beckham are all attractive people.

Hair
blonde/fair hair	brown hair	red hair	black hair	grey hair

Eyes
	grey eyes	green eyes	blue eyes	brown eyes

Mouth

Other features Point your cursor over the named feature, if you're correct the word will appear.
	moustache	beard	chin	forehead	nostrils
	eyebrows	cheeks	fringe	lips	teeth

We often use the verb to have to find out information about peoples appearances (how they look)

"What colour hair does she have?"	She has fair hair. or She has blonde hair.
"What colour hair has he got?"	He's got brown hair.
"What colour eyes has she got?"	She's got blue eyes.
"What colour eyes has he got?"	He's got brown eyes.
"Does she have long hair?"	"Yes, she does."
"Has he got long hair?"	"No, he hasn't. He's got short hair."
"Does she have a round face?"	"No, she doesn't. She has a long face."
"Does he have a round face?"	"Yes, he does."
"Has she got a large nose?"	"No, she hasn't. She's got a small nose."
"Does he have a big nose?"	"Yes he does. He has a very big nose."
"Does she have a thin mouth?"	"No, she doesn't. She has a full mouth"
"Does he have small ears?"	"No, he doesn't. He has large ears."

So what about me?

	I'm medium height.
	I have hazel eyes.	hazel = green + brown
	I have medium length, straight, brown hair.
	I wear glasses.	= + all the time
	I'm slightly overweight.
	I have a pale complexion.

Things Mr Bean does every Monday morning.

		Every Monday Mr Bean wakes up at 6.00 am.
		He gets up at 6.15 am,
		and goes to the bathroom.
		He usually has a shower,
		then he has a shave and brushes his teeth.
		He eats breakfast at about 7.00 am.
		After breakfast he reads the newspaper.
		At 7.30 am he goes to work.