Phobias are fears, but they’re generally not immediate and obvious like other fears. In other words, a phobia is not the fear you feel when you’re walking in a dark place and hear a noise in the bushes, or when your friend jumps out of a closet and shouts “Boo!” A phobia is often unconscious and not related to things that are happening to you at the moment. A phobia is more like a nagging emotional turbulence you might not even be aware of, one that causes you to unintentionally avoid things, people, situations, or places.

A phobia could also be a fear of something in particular, like a fear of trains, or spiders, or even selfies. Read on to find out about the most bizarre tech phobias the technological revolution has unfortunately brought upon us.

Technophobia

This is a fear of technology. Technophobia existed as a concept long before the era of smartphones and tablets. People have always be prone to panicking over the effects and ultimate impact new technology will have over their lives, families, and the world’s future in general. Today more than ever, our tech-driven lifestyles are still making many people uncomfortable and even anxious.

Telephonophobia

This is the fear of telephones, not in the sense of being lethal weapons but in the sense of answering a call or having to call someone.

It actually falls under the anxiety disorder spectrum of phobias, and affects a lot of people. Just think of how many times you postpone an important call because you’re afraid of how it might turn out.

Nomophobia

The proliferation of social media made everyone preoccupied and even stressed over missing out on important developments, events, and even social news due to being without instant access to a mobile phone.  “No-mobile phobia” led to the abbreviated term “nomophobia.”

Cyberphobia

You might think that there’s no reason on earth why people should fear technology and the use of computers and computerized devices. The truth is there are many people who are afraid of using computers, considering their use as an invasion of privacy. Some people are more concerned about the potential drawbacks of computer use than any benefits they provide.

Threadophobia

This is a general concept that refers to fear people feel when speaking “in public” – in other words, each time they attempt to answer or share their views on YouTube, a forum, or a website of any sort.

Polls have shown that the number-one fear for many people is public speaking, and that obviously translates into the digital world as well.

Nointernetphobia

This is the fear of not being able to be online or connected all the time. The No-Internet phobia is quite similar to nomophobia and leads to similar symptoms.

Drosmartphobia

The dreaded, soul-crushing second when you realize your smartphone has violently landed on the floor and its screen has broken (if you’re lucky, you’ll then wake up and realize it was just a dream). Drosmartphobia is the fear of Dropping your Smartphone, a fear quite familiar to all of us. (H/T to Itworld.com)

Don’t let technology related phobias get the best of you. More importantly, don’t succumb to the mother of all fears, Phobophobia, fearing fear itself. Now that’s scary.

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Aahhh … don’t you love the English language? It’s full of fancy words. Words that are tricky, words that are unpredictable – words that I can almost guarantee you will misspell.

The Center of Reading Research has looked into the English words that people are the least familiar with, using an online vocabulary test offered by Ghent University.

The participants had to press the “J” key if the word flashing before their eyes on the computer screen was a proper English word, and the “F” key if they didn’t know the word. Fewer than 3 in every 100 participants knew words like gossypol and alsike. Are you one of these people?

Here are the definitions of some of these obscure words. Be sure to learn their correct spelling in case you ever need to use them!

“chersonese” – This word comes from the Greek “??????????” which means peninsula. A peninsula is a piece of land that has one of its four sites connected to the mainland of a territory while the other three are bordered by water.

“dasyure” – According to the Dictionary.com website, dasyure is “any of several nocturnal, carnivorous marsupials of the genus Dasyurus and related genera, of Australia, Tasmania, and nearby islands, typically having a reddish or olive-brown coat marked with white spots.”

“pyknic” – This is not an archaic spelling of the word “picnic.” According to the Oxford dictionary, “pyknic” is etymologically derived from the Greek word “??????” which means thick. It describes any living species with a tendency to get fat and have a “stocky physique or a rounded body and head.”

“kalian” – A word of Persian origin, it refers to a Persian tobacco pipe that has the smoke go through water before drawing and inhaling the smoke. You might be more familiar with the terms “Hookah” or “Shisha”, the waterpipe use for smoking tobacco.

“Yogh” – This is a phonological term that describes a palatal fricative widely used in Middle English. Its sound approximates the Modern English sound of the semivowel “y” as in the word“young.”

“didapper” – The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines didapper as “a dabchick or other small grebe.” It’s the shortened form of dive-dapper.

“ossify” – The process of making something impermeable to change. The word means to become hard like a bone, or to transform into bone.

“stibnite” – The Merriam-Webster dictionary offers this word definition for stibnite: “a mineral that consists of the trisulfide of antimony and occurs in orthorhombic lead-gray crystals of metallic luster or in massive form.”

“penurious” – This is what many young people are by the end of each month: extremely poor or poverty-stricken. It also means parsimonious, having an unwillingness to spend money, or being stingy.

“skullduggery” (also written with one “l”) – Dictionary.com defines “skullduggery” as trickery; it’s an informal word used to describe an underhanded deal.

“brummagem” – This is a word that refers the English dialect spoken in Birmingham, or just relating to the city of Birmingham as a whole.

There you have it! 11 obscure words you can learn to spell, and impress everyone with your spelling knowledge!

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Language is magic. Being a living entity, language is the playground for wit, creativity, debate, and passionate banter. It never ceases to evolve, and the words that people create are a constant surprise. Spelling bees serve to demonstrate language mastery, but how often do you come across spelling bees on newly-created tech, urban slang and web buzzwords?

Urban Dictionary is an open web-based dictionary where anyone can input a word and its definition. The words are, for the most part, slang words – the category of words that tend to evolve the most quickly. This online dictionary has more than 7 million definitions and word descriptions that are predominantly witty, pop-culture terms and concepts. One of these words, “brofessional,” refers to a young man dedicated to “bro-only” activities, like partying, gaming, and flirting. Another newly-coined word is “cleptopenia,” the unconscious and unintended stealing of pens at schools, public services and corporate settings.

The 2014 spelling bee champions from this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee, Sriram Hathwar and Ansun Sujoe, were called upon by Mashable.com to spell some of the made-up words found in Urban Dictionary.

The two young men (future brofessionals?) successfully spelled “cleptopenia,” and then were asked to spelling the word “Googleheimer.” They spelled this word correctly, too. In case you were wondering, “Googleheimer” means the situation when you want to Google something but by the time you have access to a computer you no longer remember what you wanted to Google.

“Crowny,” a word that describes an object or person that’s highly desirable or of premium quality (that is, deserving the status of being or belonging to royalty), was another Urban Dictionary word successfully spelled by one of the two spelling champions.

“Procrastineating”, “Feeling Drake” and “textpectation” were three more words that challenged Sriram and Ansun. The two proved their spelling skills mastery once again, managing to correctly spell these urban slang words. Although the definition of many of these was rather hard to guess, Sriram and Ansun proved that spelling skills help you estimate new words’ orthography with a high percentage of accuracy.

This video shows the two spelling champs using their spelling-honed deductive skills and showing off their abilities, something that should inspire anyone who has a hard time figuring out the spelling of these or other words.

Urban Dictionary words reflect the wit, creativity and ever-changing status of the English language. Technology has given a lot of new official and informal words and concepts. For instance, “PHOBAR” is an acronym for Photoshopped Beyond All Recognition, a word meant to describe images of people that are circulating in social media where the images have been heavily manipulated and airbrushed so that the person in the picture is hardly recognizable.

Can you guess the meaning of the words “snowhawk” and “professional celebrity” – and could you spell them correctly, too?

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tenacious
untenable
detention
abstain
detain

If you look at the meaning of the words, you’ll notice that they each have a definition that relates to “holding” something; tenacious means “holding fast” and detain means “holding back.” They all come from the same Latin word, tenere, which means “to hold.” Once you know that the letter sequence t-e-n or t-a-i-n can have this meaning, you’ll be able to learn the word and its spelling at the same time. By learning words with the same roots, you’ll see similar letter patterns, and it’s helpful to learn words in groups to practice those patterns.

Once you’re familiar with common root words, you can start adding prefixes and suffixes and form new and longer words. While the letter patterns may change now and then, the basics of spelling stay the same, and the more root words you know, the more words you’ll be able to spell easily. You can find information on a word’s roots in most good dictionaries, and they’ll also break down the words so that you can see all of the parts and focus on spelling each part separately before you combine them into the final word. Don’t forget to use the dictionary to learn how to pronounce the word, and check for examples of how to use it as well. When you write out the word in a sample sentence, that exercise will help you remember the word in the future.

Doubled vowels also cause problems in pronunciation and spelling, although sometimes it’s not the vowels that change pronunciation. For example, with the words loose and lose both the single O and the double OO have the same “OO” sound, but the S-sound changes to a Z-sound in the second word. On the other hand, there are word pairs like bet and beet; in this case, the first E-sound is pronounced EH (the “short” vowel sound) and the second is pronounced EE (the “long” vowel sound). A “long” vowel is one that sounds like the name of the letter itself, like the sound EYE for the letter I. The change between long and short vowel sounds often happens when a “silent E” is added to the end, as in these examples:

bit / bite
hug / huge
fat / fate
tot / tote
her / here

Because there are so many different ways to spell two-vowel combinations when the vowels are different, we won’t try to establish any “rules” for you to learn. It’s too confusing to try to classify words by pronunciation when the words freight and stray and rain all use the same AY sound for the vowel clusters EI and AY and AI. The best way to practice these words is to simply write them out and study them. Using your hands to write out a word and your eyes to learn its appearance will help you better learn to use your mouth and your ears when you’re speaking and hearing it.

The sound represented by the IPA symbol /f/ is what we generally associate with the letter F in the English alphabet. It’s easy to think of words that have this sound, and many words are familiar to even the youngest child: fish, roof, feather, brief, fancy, deaf. Linking the F-sound with the F-letter is easy to do, and easy to remember. It isn’t hard to remember that the same F-sound can be produced by two F-letters together, as it these words: off, giraffe, affair, bluff, suffix, different.

Where things get complicated is when letters other than F can be used to make the F-sound when a word is pronounced. Sometimes it’s hard to explain to younger students exactly why the letters PH are pronounced /f/ when it seems completely logical to them to use the letter F instead. Unfortunately, in order to really explain why the word phone is not spelled fone, you’d have to summarize the last several hundred years of the evolution of the English language, which is probably more than a six-year-old wants to hear. Here are some other words that use the PH letter combination for the F-sound: dolphin, pharmacy, nephew, graph, phantom. And even adults might be confused by the fact that the F-sound is represented by the letter cluster PPH in the word sapphire!

Another confusing letter combination that produces the F-sound is GH. This form only sounds like /f/ when it’s used at the end of a word, and the most common examples are when these letters are combined with the vowels OU: cough, tough, rough. With the vowels AU you’ll get the word laugh – try not to laugh when your child logically spells this as laf.

Generally, the letter L in the word calf is silent, so it’s pronounced caf, but it’s important to remember silent letters and include them, so that words are spelled correctly.

Finally, for all you readers who speak “British English,” you’ll be familiar with the F-sound in the middle of the word lieutenant – where there’s no F at all!

Here’s an example of how one letter can change a word’s spelling, pronunciation, and meaning:

moral vs. morale

Moral is pronounced MOH-rull and means “a short lesson or teaching story.” When you add just one letter, it becomes the word morale.

Morale is pronounced mor-AHL, and this word means “self-confidence, enthusiasm.” Obviously, this is not at all the same as the first word! Because the pronunciation is so different, you might not make a mistake when you’re speaking, but it’s easy to mistype or misspell the word by accidentally adding or dropping that final E. However, if you’ve made sure to focus on each word’s pronunciation at the same time as you’re concentrating on learning how to spell that word, you won’t be confused.

One good way of practicing words like these that are so easy to confuse is to put them into a sentence. If possible, try to use them in the same sentence or phrase, like this:

… and so the moral of the story is “don’t do anything to destroy your teammate’s morale before the beginning of the tournament!”

Spelling improvement isn’t a stand-alone process. In order to really be sure you know a word, study its spelling, but also learn the definition of the word, how to pronounce it, and how to use it correctly. All of these aspects of word knowledge will reinforce each other, and you’ll be more confident and capable in your spoken and written communication.

US: Tell us about your ESL classes – do you teach children at school, or do you have adult students who take private lessons?

DD: At the moment I work for Binh An Secondary School, which is a state school located 30 minutes away from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). I teach English for 14 year old students (they are in eight or ninth grade).

On Mondays I teach English for kids (3-4-5 years old) at Lan Anh Nursery School (kindergarten).

US: Why did you start the ESLVietnamZone website?

DD: Long time ago (I believe it was the summer of 2010) I tried to learn graphic design with the help of my wife (she is a graphic designer). In order to remember all of the techniques she taught me, mostly for retouching photos, I decided to create different files and write every step there. Soon, my computer became a complete mess and searching through all these file was painfully. So, I decided to create an online website (better organized) and be able to access everything from any of my devices. This is how I created my first website (it does not exist any more now). Everything was written in English since I communicate with my wife in English.

Writing for that website I realized how important writing is. It helped me learn new vocabulary, practice spelling, use grammar etc. It was a totally different experience than just communicating with friends in English. I felt (and I still feel) it was the best way of learning English. So, in 2011, I created ESL Vietnam Zone website, an informative blog related to learning and teaching English as a Second/Foreign language.

US: Should people concentrate on vocabulary and spelling first, or is it more important to get comfortable speaking English at the beginning?

DD: Everybody wants to speak first but it is impossible to speak if you don’t know vocabulary. In my opinion, people should concentrate on vocabulary first. Of course, spelling comes hand in hand with vocabulary. Using vocabulary in speaking (or writing) is equally important.

US: Your website provides information for ESL teachers as well, including lesson plans. Are these the same tools you use in your classes?

DD: Yes, mostly they are. I say mostly because sometimes it is just not possible.

US: What’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone who isn’t enjoying their English classes in school?

DD: This is a difficult question. There might be many reasons and identifying these reasons is the first step. Learners usually complain about teachers … “My teacher is not funny”. This is true in some cases and it can make a class less enjoyable. The vast majority of learners learn English because they have to learn not because they have a motivation. I believe that the lack of motivation is what makes someone not enjoying their English classes. Most of the learners don’t see results after a period of hard studying. My advice for someone who is not enjoying their English classes is: be active in the class and use English outside the class. In this way you see the benefits of learning English and it creates a strong motivation to continue studying English. These make your English classes more enjoyable.

Take a look at some of the words that knocked contestants out of the most recent Scripps National Spelling Bee (for the full list, click here). Can you pronounce, spell, and define these words?

cynosure
pergameneous
diplodocus
nubuck
witloof
pekoe
douane
prerogative
jicama
totipotency

Contestants in the Scripps Spelling Bee have been winning with words as well, ever since the competitions started in 1925. Here are some of the words that helped early champions win the match. How many of them can you define, pronounce, and spell correctly?

asceticism
chlorophyll
autochthonous
kamikaze
deification
vignette
canonical
meticulosity
gladiolus
appoggiatura

If you’d like to get involved in the 2014 Scripps Spelling Bee then you need to make sure that your school (or your child’s school) is registered before October 15th. You can get more information on enrollment, registration, and rules for the competition at the official Scripps site.

Step 1: Focus on the word.

Your eyes are your first tool for learning spelling. Find the word spelled correctly on line or in a book or other text, or copy it onto another piece of paper. Focus on this word and examine it closely. Look for prefixes and suffixes that you already know how to spell, or any word roots that you recognize. Linking new information to knowledge you already have in your brain is a good way to make sure you remember the new material.

Step 2: Write the word on a piece of paper.

Even if you’re looking at the word on line, use your hand to shape the letters of the word on a piece of paper. Using your muscles like this activates a new set of neurons in the brain that help form the strong mental connections you need to memorize and recall the word and its spelling. If you find that you’ve made a mistake when you compare the word to the original, make a note of that so that you’ll be sure to avoid that mistake the next time.

Step 3: Visualize the correctly-spelled word.

Set aside your copy of the word and look at the original one again. Look at it as a whole word, as a series of letters, and as a shape or image. If you learn to recognize the shape that the word makes on the page, you’ll unconsciously also be seeing the spelling of the word. Turn the paper over or hide the computer screen, close your eyes, and recreate the image of the word in your mind.

Step 4: Write out the word again.

Open your eyes and immediately write out the word on a blank piece of paper. Check this word and its spelling with the original. If it’s correct, then write the word out several times more to make sure that you really know the word and will remember it. If you misspelled the word, go back to Step 1.

Step 5: Go back and review.

When you review something, you strengthen your ability to remember it correctly. After you learn a new word one day, review it every day for a week, then set it aside for a month or so. When you go back to this word, make sure you still know it perfectly by going through the first four steps.