Wedding Speech Delivered by the Groom -- Wedding Toasts Roasts Speeche

Wedding Speech Delivered by the Groom Ladies and Gentlemen, you are about to witness a unique event in history. This is the very first and very last time that my wife is going to let me speak on behalf of both of us. Today, so far has been a day beyond my wildest dreams. They say you don't marry someone you can live with - you marry the person who you cannot live without which is very true with Karen. I thought I had prepared myself quite well for today but nothing could have prepared me enough for when I saw Karen walk down the aisle. I thought my legs were about to give way from underneath me. Never have I seen her looking so beautiful. I was overwhelmed to the say the least. I should be used to it now as Karen always dresses to kill, its just unfortunate that she cooks the same way. So my first thank you goes to Karen, my wife, my bride and joy. Thank you for everything you have done. You know everything about me and yet you still said â€Å"I do†. Thank you. GIVE SINGLE ROSE. Ok, now for the rest of my speech. Thanks to Bob for those kind words. I know it must have been hard for you today. Although, when it came to the time for you to walk Karen down the aisle, I could have sworn I saw you running!!! Not sure about this receipt though Bob. READ RECEIPT AND GIVE TO BOB. HAND OUT PRESENT TO BOB AND FLOWERS TO JOSIE Thanks again Bob and Thanks to Josie for making sure he didn’t go on ... ...g this speech, Nicole was just getting over chicken pox and Brooke had just started scratching. I was worried to say the least. I myself have never had chicken pox so I had to stay away from them, which was extremely difficult as I love them both so much. If you could bottle their enthusiasm for this day you would be set for life. I think you will all agree, they look absolutely stunning today. Thank you both. Can I please ask you all to stand and raise your glasses in a toast to the bridesmaids, Nicole and Brooke. Well, that’s me all done. Can I please now ask you all to welcome to the stage, a man who needs no introduction†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.but I will introduce him anyway†¦.my best man and best friend, Marmaduke.

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Dominic Cole’s IELTS Blog www. dcielts. com The bar chart below shows the quarterly profit forecast for three major US companies in 2012. Write a report for a university lecturer describing the chart. You should write at least 150 words. You should spend about 20 minutes on this task. Quarterly pro? t forecasts for three major US companies in 2012 1500 1350 1200 Pro? t in millions of dollars 1050 900 750 600 450 300 150 0 Jan-March Apr-June July-Sept Oct-Dec Microsoft Ford IBM Dominic Cole’s IELTS Blog www. dcielts. comThis bar graph shows the quarterly change in pro? ts for Microsoft, Ford and IBM in 2012. The ? rst point to note is that while both Microsoft and IBM are predicted to show a substantial growth in pro? ts in this period, there is going to be little movement in the ? gures for Ford. It should also be remarked that although IBM will start the year with the lowest margin, it is predicted to be the most pro? table company by the end of the year. If we look at the numbers in detail we see that Ford is expected to make a ? st-quarter pro? t of around $825 million and this should rise marginally to $900 million by the end of September, only to fall back to its starting point by December. In stark contrast, IBM is predicted to show a steady growth in pro? ts throughout the year, shooting up from just over $180 million to exactly $1,200 million by the year? s end. After a dif? cult ? rst quarter where its pro? ts drop by around half to around $200, Microsoft is forecast to follow a similar pattern of steady growth from April to December, ? ishing at $600 million. notes 1. This report relates to future predictions. See the variety of language that refers to the future 2. The report starts by noting the two main points: general growth apart from Ford and that IBM moves from the least pro? table to the most pro? table 3. The second paragraph deals with each company in turn. It is linked by the comparisons comparing Ford to IBM and then IBM to M icrosoft 4. The word pro? t is repeated consistently but there is some effort to use synonyms or related phrases

Present-Day English (PDE) Definition and Examples

The term Present-Day English (PDE) refers to any one of the varieties of the English language (usually a standard variety) that is used by speakers who are alive today. Also called late or contemporary Modern English. But not all linguists define the term in this way. Millward and Hayes, for example, describe Present-Day English as the period since 1800. For Erik Smitterberg, on the other hand, Present-Day English refers to the period from 1961, the year in which texts that make up the Brown and LOB corpora were published, on (The Progressive in 19th-Century English, 2005). Regardless of the precise definition, Mark Ably describes contemporary English as the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand (Spoken Here, 2003). Examples and Observations Perhaps the two most salient characteristics of Present-Day English are its highly analytic grammar and its immense lexicon. Both of these features originated during the M[iddle] E[nglish] period. Although English has lost all but a handful of its inflections during ME and has undergone little inflectional change since, ME marks only the onset of the burgeoning of the English vocabulary to its current unparalleled size among the languages of the world. Ever since ME, the language has been more than hospitable to loanwords from other languages, and all subsequent periods have seen comparable influxes of loans and increases in vocabulary. . . .All areas of life in the present-day era have seen the influx of new words. To be sure, many words derive from electronic technologies . . .. Some words come from the entertainment industry such as . . . anime (Japanese animation) and celebutante (a celebrity known in fashionable society). Some words come from politics, for example, POTUS (presid ent of the United States), rubber-chicken circuit (the round of fund-raising dinners attended by politicians), and wedge-issue (a decisive political issue). . . . New words also come from a mere desire to play with the language, such as baggravation (the aggravation at having ones bags lost at the airport), fantabulous (beyond fabulous), flaggin (flashing or giving gang signs), losingest (in last place), stalkerazzi (a tabloid journalist who stalks celebrities).(C. M. Millward and Mary Hayes, A Biography of the English Language, 3rd ed. Wadsworth, 2012) Verbs in PDE The Early Modern English period, particularly the 17th and 18th centuries, witnesses developments that result in the establishment of the Present-Day English verbal system. The most noticeable of these affect the subjunctive and the modal auxiliaries, tense auxiliaries (future and [plu]perfect), passive, and the progressive (be -ing). At the end of the 18th century, a fairly high degree of paradigmatic symmetry exists in the verbal group: various combinations of tense, mood, voice and (to a certain extent) aspect can be systematically expressed by sets of auxiliaries and endings.(Matti Rissanen, Syntax. Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 3, ed. by Roger Lass. Cambridge University Press, 2000) Modals in PDE [A]lready in Present-day English we seem to be reaching a stage where some modals (shall, ought to, need) are reaching the end of their useful life.(Geoffrey Leech, Modality on the Move. Modality in Contemporary English, ed. by Roberta Facchinetti, Manfred Krug, and Frank Palmer. Mouton de Gruyter, 2003) Adverbs in PDE In Shakespeare, there are many adverbs without -ly (our will . . . which else should free have wrought, Macbeth, II.i.18f), but the -ly forms are more numerous, and the relative number has increased since then. In our example, free would be replaced by freely in present-day English.Today there is a residue of adverbs without the suffix, e.g. far, fast, long, much. In another group of adverbs, there is vacillation between suffix and no suffix, something which has been utilized systematically in a number of cases: dig deep vs. deeply involved; he was admitted free vs. speak freely; right now vs. he rightly concluded that . . .; cp. also clean(ly), direct(ly), loudly(ly), near(ly), short(ly), etc.(Hans Hansen and Hans Frede Nielsen, Irregularities in Modern English, 2nd ed. John Benjamins, 2012) Spelling and Speech Habits in Present-Day English The irregularities of present-day English spelling are more in evidence with vowels than with consonants. . . .-a/ent, -a/ence, -a/encyThis is a notorious source of mis-spellings in present-day English because the vowel in both sets of suffixes is reduced to /É™/. There is some guidance on the choice of a or e spellings from related forms with a stressed vowel: consequent - consequential; substance - substantial. All three endings -ant, -ance, -ancy or -ent, -ence, -ency may occur, but sometimes there are gaps: we have different, difference, but rarely differency; we have delinquent, delinquency, but rarely delinquence.(Edward Carney, English Spelling. Routledge, 1997)Spelling also exerts a certain influence on speech habits so that so-called spelling pronunciations come into existence. . . . [T]he previous silent t in often is pronounced by many speakers. Of this Potter writes: Of all the influences affecting present day English that of spelling upon sounds is probably the hardes t to resist (1979: 77).br/>There are, in other words, tendencies for people to write the way they speak, but also to speak the way they write. Nevertheless, the present system of English spelling has certain advantages: Paradoxically, one of the advantages of our illogical spelling is that . . . it provides a fixed standard for spelling throughout the English-speaking world and, once learnt, we encounter none of the difficulties in reading which we encounter in understanding strange accents. (Stringer 1973: 27) A further advantage (vis–à  Ã¢â‚¬â€œvis the spelling reform propagated by George Bernard Shaw) is that etymologically related words often resemble each other despite the difference in their vowel quality. For example, sonar and sonic are both spelled with o even though the first is pronounced with /əʊ/ or /oÊŠ/ and the latter with /É / or /É‘Ë /. (Stephan Gramley and Kurt-Michael Pà ¤tzold, A Survey of Modern English, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2004) Changes in Pronunciation Changes are taking place in the way words are stressed. There is a long-term trend in two-syllable words for the stress to be moved from the second syllable to the first: this has happened in living memory in such words as adult, alloy, ally and garage. It is still going on, especially where there are related noun-verb pairs. There are many pairs where the noun has first-syllable stress, and the verb second-syllable stress, and in such cases many speakers now stress the verb also on the first syllable: examples are annex, contest, contract, escort, export, import, increase, progress, protest and transfer. In cases where both the noun and the verb have second-syllable stress, there is a tendency for the noun to be given first-syllable stress, as with discharge, dispute, redress and research; occasionally the verb may also be given first-syllable stress. (Charles Barber, Joan Beal, and Philip Shaw, The English Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2009)