Assalamuaikum……..
Today,in my opinion about listening activity,I choose ‘cell’ and ‘dumb down’ in this David Crystal online session. I choose another words from this online session. With this word ‘cell’, I can know about meaning of this word. When mobile phone technology came in a few years ago, the term was immediately shortened. Mobile phones became 'mobiles'. In the United States, a different term emerged, 'cell phone', short for cellular phone. Now, cell phone was tricky because some people spelled it as one word and some people spelled it as two. He did a search on Google the other day, and the one-word spelling got eighteen million hits, and the two-word spelling got a hundred and thirty-five million hits. So it seems you can use both spellings at the moment. But either way, people shortened the phrase to 'cell'. Somebody the other day said to me, 'Have you got your cell?' 'Call me on your cell!' 'Sync your cell with your company!' - that's synchronise - synchronise your cell with your company - that's the sort of phrase you get these days.
Another word I choose from this David Crystal learning is ‘dumb down’. The word origin from in the 1930s, you could dumb something down. For instance, a newspaper making a story more appealing to the masses would say, 'we're dumbing it down', or something like that. It was an American usage, dumb meant stupid. It was transitive, that is the verb governed an object, 'you're dumbing something down'. Now in the 1990s, we get a different grammatical use - a use of the verb without an object, an intransitive use, 'they're dumbing down'. It has the same meaning, it means become less intellectually challenginng.