🐄 The Bovine View
It's Friday, our usual Bovine View day; but this one comes with a slightly superstitious twist.

Today is Friday the 13th, a date many people in the English-speaking world still consider unlucky.

- Some buildings quietly skip the 13th floor.
- Some airlines avoid row 13.
- And plenty of people still prefer not to make important decisions on this particular day.

Friday the 13th is really the result of two older beliefs coming together.

• Friday was historically considered an unlucky day in parts of Europe.
• 13 was thought to disturb the “perfect” number 12
(12 months, 12 apostles, 12 zodiac signs).

Interestingly, the idea of Friday the 13th itself is not especially ancient. Historians only begin to see clear references to it in the 19th century.

But Friday the 13th is not the only thing people worry about.

Other well-known superstitions include:

🐈‍⬛ A black cat crossing your path
🪞 Breaking a mirror (said to bring seven years of bad luck)
🪜 Walking under a ladder
🧂 Spilling salt

Whether we believe they will bring us bad luck or not, they all come from the same place.

𝕱𝕰𝕬𝕽!! (Fear)🙀

English even has a spectacularly long word for the 𝕱𝕰𝕬𝕽 of Friday the 13th:

paraskevidekatriaphobia
(/ˌpærəˌskɛvɪˌdɛkəˌtriːəˈfoʊbiə/)

If you don't know the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), then you can pronounce it like this:
par-uh-SKEV-ih-dek-uh-TREE-uh-FOH-bee-uh

Yes, that really is a word.

And English does this quite often.

Instead of saying “fear of something,” the language often creates a single word by combining a Greek root with -phobia.

For example:

• nycto (night) + phobia = nyctophobia, the fear of darkness
• pogon (beard) + phobia = pogonophobia, the fear of beards
• claustro (enclosed place) + phobia = claustrophobia, the fear of small spaces

Sometimes the language even becomes a little ironic.

There is a word for the fear of long words:
hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia 👈

This is the second longest word in the English dictionary and a rather cruel joke.😨

📚 How these words are used

In everyday English we normally say have or suffer from + the phobia.
For example:
• She has claustrophobia, so she hates elevators.
• He suffers from arachnophobia, so spiders terrify him.
• Some people joke that they have hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, the fear of long words.

So instead of saying “He has a fear of spiders,” English often says:

“He has arachnophobia.”

📚 Why this matters for IELTS and other exams

Many advanced English words come from Greek or Latin roots.

If you can recognise part of a word, you can often guess its meaning, even if you have never seen the word before.

This can be very helpful in IELTS Reading and other academic tests.

#TheBovineView #PhobiaWords #EnglishSuperstitions

🥔 March 14 – National Potato Chip Day

Today is National Potato Chip Day, celebrating one of the world’s most popular snacks.

One famous story says potato chips were invented in 1853 in Saratoga Springs, New York. A chef named George Crum supposedly became annoyed when a customer complained that his fried potatoes were too thick. Crum sliced the potatoes extremely thin, fried them until crisp, added salt — and the customer loved them.

The snack quickly became known as “Saratoga Chips.”

You can read more here: National Potato Chip Day

But there is also an interesting English vocabulary difference.

🇬🇧 In British English, they are called crisps.
🇺🇸 In American English, they are called chips.

So in Britain:

• crisps = the snack
• chips = what Americans call French fries

Now here’s the language point.

The word crisp is a little onomatopoeic.

Onomatopoeia is when a word imitates the sound it describes.

Think about the sound when you bite into a crisp:

crisp! crunch! crack! 👈 click here to hear the pronunciation.

The word itself almost imitates that sharp crunching sound.

Other English onomatopoeic words include:

• ding – a small bell sound
• buzz – the sound of a bee or something vibrating
• clang – metal striking metal
• pop – a small explosive sound

These words are useful because English often turns sound words into verbs.

For example:

• The bell dinged when the door opened.
• Bees buzzed around the flowers.
• The cork popped.

Most onomatopoeic verbs follow the regular -ed pattern:

buzz → buzzed
clang → clanged
pop → popped
ding → dinged

Learners sometimes expect something like ding → dang → dung, because English also has verbs like:

sing → sang → sung

But ding is regular — the past form is dinged.

How is your knowledge of onomatopoeic words? Try the quiz below👇

🎧 Sound Quiz🎧

Play the video above. above.👆You will hear five sound effects.👂

Each sound matches an onomatopoeic verb.

For each sound, choose the correct word from the question lists below👇