Hello there, this is episode 131 of The Victor Prep, a vocab podcast, and I'm going to

read you a poem today which is particularly inventive in terms of language usage, and

also for a change it's quite a light-hearted poem, as of course, not every poem needs

to be so serious, and we definitely need some fun and silliness in our lives.

I particularly like this poem because it illustrates a really nice point about words and how we

use them. So I often talk on the podcast about when is the right time to use a word? Is this word

appropriate or not for a different situation, and so on? And there's an amazing secret truth here,

and it's that when you begin it to a language, or perhaps intermediate to a language,

you have to follow these rules about words and usage, because if you're uncertain or you lack

confidence, and then you choose some words that are perhaps not suited to the situation or you

get your usage a little mixed up, and if you do this while showing that you're not confident,

then any native speaker who's there listening to you will assume you're making a mistake or

didn't mean whatever you said, and they will either try to correct you, but they will simply

discount or dismiss whatever you are saying, so they'll essentially reject your message or reject

the communication and just kind of push it out of their minds. However, and this is the critical

piece. If you are confident and advanced in your language skills, and if you talk confidently

with an air of confidence, then you can misuse words, use them in the wrong context,

play with language in a deliberate way, purposefully, and the people who are listening to you

won't assume you're making a mistake. They'll realize something is different and that the usage

maybe isn't quite right, but they won't try and change you, they will change themselves,

they will try and adapt their mind and their way of thinking to your usage or your language,

so they won't try and correct you and they won't dismiss the words you're using,

...