The amount of words in English is mesmerizing.

"You ignite the moxa stick and let it burn," I said.

"Moxibustion and acupunture are complementary in TCM."

The Oxford Advanced American Dictionary states that acupressure was originally from Japan, in its respective word entry.

But it was from China, and it's a part of the Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Japanese had learned it from China long time ago, supposedly.


The boon of acupressure is that anyone can be the masseur or masseuse, so that it can be done at home.

I often misheard "pears" as "pairs."

The vowel sound in "pear" is not the same as in "appear," "dear," "fear," "gear," "hear," and "sear." But it is the same as in "bear," "wear," and "year."

Sometimes it feels like that the verbosity, or sprawl, of English is out of control.

Just few examples. There's "for instance," there's "for example," and there's "e.g." In addition, there's "exemplary," as well as "exemplifiable."

Today, I've found out that apart from "exaggerate," there exists "overexaggerate." And second-graders are constantly uttering the latter.

It's "bunk bed," not "bunker bed."

Taken at face value, the word "grandfather" looks grander than "forefather", doesn't it?

In reality, it's the opposite way.

The blogosphere in China has significantly withered.

Many blogging websites have died or been cancelled, for instance, the blogs at http://www.ifeng.com/ .

Emblazoned T-shirts are very popular.

But I don't think they are good clothing generally.

茶叙珠江，一盅两件。

Nowadays, normally I learn several batches of English words per week.

That would actually take a bunch of my hours.

Now that Intel's processor chips have become unmitigated disasters due to the "Meltdown" security flaw and so on, especially in the arena of cloud computing.

It appears that AMD, after seemingly many years of losses, has turned the table on Intel, suddenly and unexpectedly.

Academic knowledge, for its own sake...

Sometime you have to be able to walk on water, like a boss.

In this day and age, there's too much delectation.

Yet much, if not most, of it feels somehow empty.

Tim Hortons in Montreal used to have a clam chowder soup.

It was good.

Uber allegedly flouted laws.

And they want to change incumbent laws.

The word "plodding" has got some negative connotations with it.

But it should carry mostly positive ones.

Oh, "dove" just means "pigeon."

There are too many luminaries in the U.S. and Canada whom I haven't heard of.

Many societal mechanisms and institutions need to be ameliorated.

For example, religions, as well as marriage.

There are a lot of frivolities in social media.

In order to save some time, unnecessary information should be largely expunged from long-winded university textbooks.

You can reject people.

But try not to spurn anyone.

Sometime it feels like that the Canadian governments are adjudicating on too many matters in Canadians' household life.

Where are the fine lines between private matters and public ones?

Such a lovely pic about dunce's cap.

(http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/dunce_hat.jpg )

Sun Wukong, the monkey king, is so mischievous in the ancient Chinese novel "Journey to the West."

The festive white snows have brought with them extreme coldness.

Some Canadian journalist writers are somewhat flippant or simplitistically ignorant.

Social media exacerbates our severe problem of information overload.

How come some American businessmen seem to be overly competitive and not magnanimous at all to their competitors?

Yes, livelihood or to become well off can be competition at times. But life is NOT.

Excuses include real extenuating circumstances.

In the future, the choice of my system Python's version has to be chewed on.

Otherwise, a lot of small headaches would be awaiting me down the road.

Chinese is my first language.

But English is my Swiss army knife.

GUI interface is just an appendage in Linux distros.

Almost everything larger-than-life is done in command line.

Spirituality can make one unflappable.

Tattletales get lampooned in school.

I like the sound of the word "acquiescing."

Good wasabi is zesty, but hard to come by in average Montreal restaurants.

Businesses seem to be zealous about AI.

Competition has forced them to.

Confusing are the meanings of the word "contemporary."

"Ascertain" means very differently than "verify."

It seems that in China, nepotism is less in force than before.

Nexus phones are exemplary of Google's products.

They got discontinued before long by Google.

Prodigious amounts of information are calling for our attention.

But I want to refuse most of them. Less is more.

We've long acquiesced to the market economy.

Almost everybody is scrambling for some sort of AI glitz.

Is the epitaph being written for traditional web application software?

It seems that in Montreal, some good elementary, secondary, and post-secondary schools keep churning out assiduous pupils with formal academic literacy skills.

The problem is, those skills are sort of too narrow in today's and tomorrow's world, given the sacrifices of such massive amounts of time and efforts paid in order to gain the aforementioned skills.

"Tuck in your undershirt," J said.

For early childhood education, I think that the Reggio Emilia approach is better than the Montessori one.

I'll get my feet wet and continue to learn a little French.

Oui, monsieur.

Many young dudes like to rock out and chill out.

Tethered pets look lovable outside stores.

Shimmying can be done with the shoulders. Or with the hips, as the below video shows:

By the way, compared with those dances with body movements that are so provocative that they stretch credulity, belly dance just looks greatly cleaner.

Yeah, it's agreed that the magazine The Economist is an erudite one.

And its English is kind of difficult.

The English word "marionette" is very different than "marinate."

The former means the sort of complex puppets that are controlled with strings.

Much posturing does no good.

Information regarding the all flourishing Artificial Intelligence has been overflowing in the media.

As people grow their ages, more and more of them capitulate to the societal pressures.

I had been vacillating between PythonAnywhere and Heroku as my current PaaS choice.

Sanctimonious people are apt to be hypocritical.

And certainly they are not very amiable.

Sassy celebrities wear store-bought clothing but they have much more discerning tastes and eyes.

Religious disagreement, or disputes, can get people to become flustered, or even very angry.

There's a children books author named "Holly Hobbie."

It can be her true name, not her pen name.

The interesting thing for me is that her first name can be confused with "holy," and, her last name can be confused with "hobby." For that matter, her parents' family, as a whole, are referred to by others as "the Hobbies," which exactly is the plural form of the English word "hobby." Swoon...

"Candor" is different than "honesty."

All this hurtling of Android apps' updating is off-putting for me.

Almost every week, there are more than a dozen apps waiting for me to give permissions for updates which are going to occupy more phone storage and RAM space.

Christianity defines that covetousness is not a virtue.

Instead, it is a sin.

The process of setting up a new Android phone with apps almost full of advertisements and bloatware feels almost like rigmarole, compared to that of setting up a Linux Mint computer.

Academic textbooks published in North America are apt to be overly didactic, as well as a little long-winded.

In most Western countries, many, if not most, husbands have become, are becoming, or will become unwitting victims under multiple collective forces which are not so benign to men, including the family court system.

The situation is actually bleak and going to bring severe consequences, for men, and women, as well as children.

Matrimony has been becoming an art, discipline, institution, and treasure to be massively lost.

Motor scooters are a sort of light motorcycles.

"On call" is very different than "on the phone."

I encountered a children's graph book that does not make sense, or even is outright stupid.

In the female authors' narration, the "very little red riding hood" emotionally manipulated a wolf and led him into the house of the teeny girl's grandma. And then she cried and cried, so the wolf tried very hard to please her. Then she fell asleep, thereafter the exhausted wolf, as well as grandma, fell asleep "happily ever after."

A wolf is a wolf, who eats humans and animals all the time.

What does the particular story book teach young girls to do in their future prime years during which they will pass by a"wolf" on the side of a road?

...

To recklessly and heedlessly lead a bad boy into her family's life while emotionally manipulating him?

The outdoor garbage chute looks intereting on those semi-constructed buildings, doesn't it?

North American mainstream media should publish more of men's diatribes, as well as gentler opinions, against the current family court system.

I was left with a deep impression by the excruciating inquisition near the end of the French film "The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc".

The word "platitude" is a little difficult for me to retain.

Google Inc., aka Alphabet Inc., has been swift to invest in technological trends.

Yippee! English has sooooo many words, and it will take me forever to learn them!

The word "fastidious" sounds interesting, eh?

Babbling springs are somewhat characteristic of many areas of China, I suppose?

Many people often wish to lead a sleek life.

However, that's only the appearance. A sleek life is not necessarily a fulfilling one.

Many Muslims come across as individuals who believe that his own destiny is already predetermined by Allah.

Destiny...

It seems that many people in the Chinese community, including some Hong Kong Chinese, don't know that Mr. Ka-shing Li (李嘉诚) is very philanthropic, who is a Hong Kong businessman and the long-time richest Chinese in the world.

Women tend to like "free-range" jobs more, so to speak.

Tech support people are required to be on call throughout day and night.

Why do the wild beasts such as lions and hyenas all have luminous eyes in the dark night, as shown in wild life documentaries?

It seems that Australian women and American ones are two of a kind.

"Scintillating" is a difficult English word for me to remember.

There's no respite in sight from all these torrents of technological shifts.

It seems that public manifestations of private grief were never a taboo in traditional Chinese culture.

In this day and age, being vivacious and curvacious does not guarantee a husband, or a partner, for a woman. Far from it.

Even though naturally, fine women in resplendent dresses still make young men be agog with impulsive curiosity.

In Africa, the sleek living bodies of buffalos often tragically become meals for lions and lionesses.

Nearby the elevator door, the woman's tension was so apparent and almost tangible.

The elusive Artificial Intelligence is being reported in almost every medium.

When will all this enthusiasm wear off?

I felt a frisson when I first saw, on YouTube, lions and lionesses kill buffalos and eat them alive.

Lions are extremely violent and powerful killing machines.

Tigers ditto.

When you write a software program, the niggling doubts don't really go away until you finally successfully run it with multiple testing inputs.

Sometimes it's joy, and sometimes it's pain. C'est la vie, to coin a phrase.

To augment one's body means a totally different thing than to enhance one's body.

In this day and age, more and more people have become so precipitate, or even impetuous, that they have taken the route of body augmentation.

It's interesting to know that hippos are also called "river horses" in English.

And, like horses, they are fond of eating grass. That's the opposite with crocs' dieting habits.

Oh, those giant bloody carcasses are disgusting in the video below.

Dictation is done every week in the classrooms of the lower grades of elementary schools.