Elton Jones

The Book Is on the Table Elton Jones

At the end of the noughties I attended a graduation ceremony in the Great Hall at the University of Leeds. There, I was awarded with a Master of Arts degree in Linguistics and English Language Teaching. Just ten years before I had only basic skills in English and was stuck working in a street stall in South America, earning £60 per month. This narrative tells about the adventurous journey learning English and how English empowered me to escape from a social background of mediocrity. Along this journey I learned about Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, English Learning (as a foreign/ second language), and have discovered some sort of supernatural power that English bestowed upon me. I invite the readers to retrace the steps of such discovery and to observe the intrinsic connection between language and reality. Along the way, the reader will be introduced to a car tradesman from Yorkshire, a promising conservative student, a pious and steadfast mother, a sickening drag queen who impersonates Madonna, the fierce rioters of Stonewall, an industrious and cunning linguistics teacher, a devout Christian who believes that aliens control this world, and a famous American linguist who changed some prejudicial views on Black English vernacular. The readers should feel free to learn a few linguistic technical terms, some car trade jargon, a bunch of dialectical words, and a mouthful of taboo language. And if the reader incidentally learns to conjure some magic spell using English, as a happy by product, well... good for you.