A Drunk Bus Driver And A Bad A :: essays research papers

Sometimes, even from the most unsuspecting people wonderful and profound messages can originate. This is the story of one such incident when much could be learned from a person like that. On the way to school one day, this kid named Patrick went around telling everyone that he had some beer in his lunch box. Now in the 9th grade, this topic of conversation is new and exciting. He was the center of attention, and was enjoying it immensely. We all knew he didn’t have any in there, but it was still fun to talk like he did. In all the commotion we failed to realize that the bus had come to a stop on the side of the road. We finally realized what was happening, and as the bus driver made her way through the aisle, you could see kids shoving paper balls in their bags, and sitting on batteries and rocks, which they were throwing out the window. The bus was unusually silent as the bus driver, Bertha we called her, waded her way through the narrow seats. Kids visibly squished as close as possible to the windows, some in an attempt to hide something, others just out of fear that the may inadvertently come into contact with the beast coming through. Bertha was 7 feet tall, and appeared to be one of those ex-weight lifters, that had been on steroids for most of their adult life. Her neck was bigger than that of football players, and her arms resembled those of the body builders sometimes on ESPN. Her gut brought thoughts of the worlds strongest man competition to mind. She was big, and no one, not even Superman, or Batman could get away with messing with her. To us she might as well have been dressed in some military uniform, carrying a leather riding-crop. The fear kept us in line most of the time. She strode right up to Patrick, and halted just short of him. Not a word was exchanged for a full minute, the two just looked at each other, a battle of wits. Patrick was the first to speak. "Waddaya want?" he said with a sneer. "What’s in the box Patrick?" she thundered, as if the voice of God. "None of your business!" He retorted. He was "dead", what was going wrong in his head, she had at least two feet on him, and her arms could crush him like a worm in pliers.

Payroll Accounting Cycle Essay

The Payroll Accounting Cycle or Payroll Cycle is basically a process for recording time and attendance and converting that data into payroll calculations and payroll disbursements (Robertson, 2003). This cycle covers all activities related to payroll from hiring and firing to pay distribution. The payroll cycle has four basic stages; recruitment, which covers the identification of vacant positions, advertising for the vacancies, and selection of a candidate for hire, time and attendance, which is a record of all the work hours of the employees, salary distribution, which involves the depositing of paychecks into the employees account, and unfunded liability, which determines the unfunded annual leave and separation pay (Payroll Cycle, 2005). The most important internal control process in the Payroll Accounting Cycle is the division of duties (Bierstaker, 1997). Under this control process, the main tasks should be handled by different people.  This means that processes such as the hiring and firing of personnel and the management of labor relations, the supervision approval of work time, the preparation and timekeeping of payroll, the payroll check preparation and related payroll reports as well as the payroll distribution and actual custody of checks and its subsequent distribution to employees, should all be handled by five separate auditors to ensure the integrity and accuracy of the Payroll Cycle (Robertson, 2003). Another specific internal control in the Payroll Cycle is by implementing authorization requirements. This basically acts as a checks and balance feature in the Payroll Accounting Cycle (Bierstaker, 1997). In this control process, the pay base data, which is the data on which pay is based including factors such as hours, piece rate volume, and incentives, and personnel hiring and firing decisions, should all be initially approved by a supervisor or an independent department (Robertson, 2003). Providing that all these controls are implemented properly, there should be no relative weaknesses in the Payroll Cycle. There are probabilities however that the internal control systems will fail to detect material misstatements. The methods that can be used to identify the strengths and weaknesses in the Payroll Accounting Cycle of a business involve careful auditing, risk assessment and control risk assessment (Bierstaker, 1997). In conducting control risk assessments it should always be remembered that if the control risk is assessed very low, substantive audit procedures can be limited in cost-saving ways. If it is assessed very high, substantive procedures will need to be designed to lower the risk of failing to detect material misstatement in the account balances (Robertson, 2003). There is no perfect Payroll Accounting Cycle and control measures should always be implemented and audited periodically.

Definition and Examples of Linguistic Americanization

In linguistics, Americanization is the influence of the distinctive lexical and grammatical forms of American English on other varieties of the English language. Also called linguistic Americanization. As Leech and Smith* observe below, If the term Americanization is taken to imply direct influence of AmE on BrE, it should be treated with caution (2009).See Examples and Observations below. Examples and Observations Globalization in the current era is associated, for better or for worse, with Americanization. This is particularly true of its cultural dimension. For it is the United States, as the worlds hyper-power, that has the economic, military, and political power to projects its culture and values globally. Yet, as many commentators have noted, Americans appear parochial and unworldly, hardly the cosmopolitan sophisticates needed to proffer a truly global vision.The ambiguity of the United States representing globality is perhaps no more apparent than in the projection of its language globally. On the one hand, Americans are particularly notorious for their linguistic insularity, rarely exhibiting the foreign language proficiency so common elsewhere in the world. Yet, as well known, the American language, English, is a global import, inherited from an earlier global power, England. Hence American ownership of global English is more tenuous than its ownership of other global cultural icons, such as McDonalds or Disney.(Selma K. Sonntag, The Local Politics of Global English: Case Studies in Linguistic Globalization. Lexington Books, 2003)Grammatical and Lexical ChangesThe evidence provided by the Brown family of corpora--especially the comparison between the British corpora (1961, 1991) and the American corpora (1961, 1992)--often shows AmE to be in the lead or to show a more extreme tendency, and BrE to be following in its wake. Thus, must, in our data, has declined more in AmE than in BrE, and has become much rarer than have to and (have) got to in AmE conversational speech. Users of British English are familiar with lexical changes due to American influence, such as increasing use of movie(s) and guy(s), but grammatical changes from the same source are less noticeable. . . . [A] finding that AmE is ahead of BrE in a given frequency change does not necessarily imply direct transatlantic influence--it could simply be an ongoing change in both varieties where AmE is mor e advanced. If the term Americanization is taken to imply direct influence of AmE on BrE, it should be treated with caution.(*Geoffrey Leech and Nicholas Smith, Change and Constancy in Linguistic Change: How Grammatical Usage in Written English Evolved in the Period 1931-1991. Corpus Linguistics: Refinements and Reassessments, ed. by Antoinette Renouf and Andrew Kehoe. Rodopi, 2009)Be going to[B]e going to was more than twice as frequent in the American corpus as in the Australian or British corpora, suggesting that Americanization may be a factor in its growing popularity. That colloquialization may be another relevant factor is suggested by the finding that be going to is greatly preferred in speech over writing (by a ratio of 9.9:1), further confirmation for the applicability of this suggestion to AmE and BrE being provided by Leechs (2003) finding that between 1961 and 1991/2 be going to enjoyed a strong increase in popularity in American writing (51.6%) and in British writing ( 18.5%).(Peter Collins, The English Modals and Semi-Modals: Regional and Stylistic Variation. The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation: Corpus Evidence on English Past and Present, ed. by Terttu Nevalainen. John Benjamins, 2008)The Americanization of EuropeBecause of the advent of linguistic Americanization, . . . one can no longer claim that Europes lingua franca is unequivocally a British commodity. English is emerging in Europe, not only as a universal language, but also as a potential norm-generating variety. . . .Basically, what we have is a traditional basis for ELT [English Language Teaching], one centered in BrE, on the teacher as model, on British and American social studies, and on the goal of mimicking the idealized native speaker, evolving into a platform for ELT which constitutes a radical departure from such beliefs and practices. Instead, linguistic Americanization, the mixing of BrE and AmE which suggests a kind of mid-Atlantic accent and a rich blend of lexical usage, th e idea of a variety of Euro-English, the use of postcolonial texts in cultural studies modules, and the desire to develop cross-cultural communicative skills, is on the upswing, while BrE, prescriptivism, and traditionalist positioning are declining.(Marko Modiano, EIL, Native-Speakerism and the Failure of European ELT. English as an International Language: Perspectives and Pedagogical Issues, ed. by Farzad Sharifian. Multilingual Matters, 2009)Yiddish and American English: A Two-Way ProcessThroughout Yekl [1896] and his early stories, [Abraham] Cahan translates the Yiddish of characters into correct (albeit ornate) English while leaving incorporated English words in their misspelled, italicized forms: feller (fellow), for example, or preticly (perhaps particular). Speech thus represents the cultural intermixture arising from contact between the immigrant and American society, an intermixture captured in remarkably hybrid sentences--Dont you always say you like to dansh with me becu sh I am a good dansher? (Yekl, 41)--and even in individual words like oyshgreen: A verb coined from the Yiddish oys, out, and the English green, and signifying to cease being green (95n).This narrative technique also represents a reversal of perspective, whereby English becomes the contaminating element within another language. The Americanization of Yiddish is given from a Yiddish perspective. English words are thrown back--rulesh (rules), deshepoitn (disappoint), saresfied (satisfied)--transformed and defamiliarized by their inclusion in another linguistic system. Just as Yiddish becomes Americanized in Yekl, American English becomes Yiddishized: transformative linguistic contact is shown as a two-way process.(Gavin Roger Jones, Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America. University of California Press, 1999) Alternate Spellings: Americanisation