full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Kevin Toolis: What the Irish wake teaches us about living and dying

Unscramble the Blue Letters

When I was seven, my mother took me to meet my first corpse. A wake on the island of our acnotsres. An old man with hairy nostrils linyg in a box, who I instinctively knew wasn't seilpneg. Even then in her manertal care she was tnciehag her boy to overcome the fear of death, just as her community had overcome their fear together for thousands of years. My family have leivd in the same village on an island off the coast of County Mayo in Ireland for the last 250 years. A real wake has got a real dead body. A dead one of us.

Open Cloze

When I was seven, my mother took me to meet my first corpse. A wake on the island of our _________. An old man with hairy nostrils _____ in a box, who I instinctively knew wasn't ________. Even then in her ________ care she was ________ her boy to overcome the fear of death, just as her community had overcome their fear together for thousands of years. My family have _____ in the same village on an island off the coast of County Mayo in Ireland for the last 250 years. A real wake has got a real dead body. A dead one of us.

Solution

  1. ancestors
  2. lying
  3. lived
  4. teaching
  5. maternal
  6. sleeping

Original Text

When I was seven, my mother took me to meet my first corpse. A wake on the island of our ancestors. An old man with hairy nostrils lying in a box, who I instinctively knew wasn't sleeping. Even then in her maternal care she was teaching her boy to overcome the fear of death, just as her community had overcome their fear together for thousands of years. My family have lived in the same village on an island off the coast of County Mayo in Ireland for the last 250 years. A real wake has got a real dead body. A dead one of us.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
dead son 2
dead wrong 2

Important Words

  1. ancestors
  2. body
  3. box
  4. boy
  5. care
  6. coast
  7. community
  8. corpse
  9. county
  10. dead
  11. death
  12. family
  13. fear
  14. hairy
  15. instinctively
  16. ireland
  17. island
  18. knew
  19. lived
  20. lying
  21. man
  22. maternal
  23. mayo
  24. meet
  25. mother
  26. nostrils
  27. overcome
  28. real
  29. sleeping
  30. teaching
  31. thousands
  32. village
  33. wake
  34. years