Learning english from masters

Dear Friends !!!

English being a foreign language, which we are to master to keep pace with the Globalized World, has always fascinated me. My interest in the subject impelled me to search for every possible way that may satiate my desire to learn.

One of these ways led me to the writings of acclaimed English Authors. And I found that mere reading or glancing through their works won’t serve my purpose. I have to STUDY those works of Art; I have to read between the lines; store them in my long-term memory so that when situation demands, I can recall them and put to practice.

The highlighted portions of the following examples ( Mainly from a novel by Dan Brown), I believe, will illustrate my point.

• His accent was not easy to place.

• “Senator Sexton?” A reporter materialized beside the table.

 Sexton’s demeanor thawed instantly.

• Rachel fished the pager from her handbag and pressed a preset sequence of five buttons, confirming that she was indeed the person holding the pager.

• Outside, an icy wind buffeted the shelter, threatening to tear it from its moorings.

• To call the NRO director a plain man was in itself an overstatement. NRO Director William Pickering was diminutive, with pale skin, a forgettable face, a bald head, and hazel eyes, which despite having gazed upon the country’s deepest secrets, appeared as two shallow pools. Nonetheless, to those who worked under him, Pickering towered.

• William Pickering made no bones about his view of politicians as transitory figureheads who passed fleetingly across a chessboard whose real players were men like Pickering himself–seasoned “lifers” who had been around long enough to understand the game with some perspective.

• Before she had even buckled herself in, the craft was airborne, banking hard across the Virginia woods.

• Of course, when it backfired...And backfire, it had for the White House. About a month ago, the President’s campaign staff, unsettled by the slipping polls, had decided to get aggressive and leak a story they suspected to be true.

• “We’re landing on ice?” she demanded. The pilot did not respond. He was concentrating on the buffeting wind. Rachel felt a drag in her gut as the craft decelerated and dropped toward the ice channel. High snow beams rose on either side of the aircraft, and Rachel held her breath, knowing the slightest miscalculation in the narrow channel would mean certain death. The wavering plane dropped lower between the beams, and the turbulence suddenly disappeared. Sheltered there from the wind, the plane touched down perfectly on the ice.

• Trench was revered in Washington as a goddess in the political arena. She was said to possess analytical skills that bordered on the clairvoyant. Her decade running the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research had helped hone a lethally sharp, critical mind. Unfortunately, accompanying Tench’s political savvy came an icy temperament that few could endure for more than a few minutes. Marjorie Tench had been blessed with all the brains of a supercomputer–and the warmth of one, too. Nonetheless, President Zach Herney had little trouble tolerating the woman’s idiosyncrasies; her intellect and hard work were almost single-handedly responsible for putting Herney in office in the first place.

• As Rachel Sexton followed Lawrence Ekstrom into the habisphere, she found herself walking through an eerie, translucent maze of hallways. The labyrinthine network appeared to have been fashioned by hanging sheets of opaque plastic across tautly strung wires. The floor of the maze was nonexistent–a sheet of solid ice, carpeted with strips of rubber matting for traction. They passed a rudimentary living area lined with cots and chemical toilets. Thankfully, the air in the habisphere was warm, albeit heavy with the mingled potpourri of indistinguishable  smells that accompany humans in tight quarters. Somewhere a generator droned, apparently the source of the electricity that powered the bare bulbs hanging from draped extension cords in the hallway.
• It was not so much the bugs’ abundance that impressed as it was their resilience.