Come drink, laugh and talk (dirty?) with me: it’s Drinkglish!

Introducing my new project: be my guest?

Plus, other tidbits of news, down below.

Drinkglish has been in the works for a while and it’s still in the embryonic experimental stage, but hey, if I don’t officially roll this out now I may never do so.

Being a ridiculously sentimental and nostalgic old fool, I was prompted to start this project by the 20-year anniversary of getting my English Teaching certification (the CELTA) in Prague. That involved way too much drinking and not enough conscientious lesson planning. Teaching English was supposed to be a two-year plan, by the way.

As the name suggests, it’s a portmanteau of Drink + English (it was originally called Drunkglish). Despite the name, participation does NOT mean getting sloshed on camera and booze is optional. I’d hate to scare anyone off.

Drinkglish is less threatening and far more inclusive. It also spares my audience from awful humour like this:

“This is going to be on YouTube and, why not, I can throw it up on Substack too (loosely intended pun, sorry).”

Its subtitle is either Laughing & Language or Laughing at Language. As usual, I’m being indecisive. I’m also still working out the best channel description, logo, tagline, etc. Anyone know a Social Media Manager willing to work for free? (haha)

If you’d like to be a part of it, you can have a cup of tea, coffee, pickle juice, kefir, bone broth, whatever. I’ll usually be drinking something – this does NOT mean I will be drunk. It will depend on the episode and the guest. No peer pressure will be involved (but please, I beg you, don’t let me drink on my own too much).

I got off to a bad start in episode 1: no drink at all, not even a cup of tea. Episode 2 was a 10am conversation with a fellow teacher, and we were both on coffee. Episode 3 did, finally, feature booze – it’s me solo, sharing some 40-50 of my favourite books and drinking a fine English ale.

(My first podcast right here on Substack, got off to a roaring start: I sipped a dry martini while my lovely guest

Faith Liversedge

quaffed a gin and tonic in our Christmas nostalgia chat.)

As it says on my About page, “a love of language is at the heart of everything I do.” There are already too many dull and uninspiring language-related videos out there, from what my [limited and cursory] research has uncovered. I aim for it to be fun, informative, amusing and entertaining enough to appeal to a wider audience. As befits the nature of this Substack, I’m going for a polymathic and well-rounded approach, and keeping things conversational and mostly unscripted.

In other words, “winging it elevated to an art form.”¹

There are 3 components:

1. Me teaching students – English lessons where the student picks the topic, and we see what kind of language and ideas emerge.

2. Me with a fellow teacher, talking about language. We might have a rough topic or theme but otherwise it’s impromptu. We could be discussing idioms, strange vocabulary, philosophical grammar, pronunciation, American v British English, etc.

3. The part where most of you, my dear readers, come into play – me talking to regular, everyday people about a topic of your choice (football, love, books, gardening, AI, Substack (!), food, etc) but where I might occasionally interrupt/interject to highlight new language and pronunciation.

For fellow Substackers, we could talk about the topics in your newsletter or a recent post or a theme you want to explore. You can use it to promote your own Substack too.

This is very experimental and I don’t know what it’s going to look like or if it will be a total flop. But it sounds fun, and I’m eager to play around with it.

I have a couple of language learning volunteers eager to combine drinking with an English lesson, something akin to Drunk History on YouTube, where historians, some of them well-known, get trolleyed/smashed/half-cut/trashed/blottoed and discuss history. Some of them even throw up on camera - I can assure you that it won’t turn into anything like that! (I hope)

Episode 3: The books that transformed me

In my last piece, a guest post for

Alicia

at Reads with Alicia, I shared a few of the books that have been transformative for me.

This is what inspired me episode 3:

I was in a wistful mood and lamented the fact that my precious books are scattered all over the damn place, in 4 countries. With every passing day, I fear my dream of having my own library and cosy armchair to read to my heart’s content is slipping away. I’ve long been tempted to write a post, a book chapter or even an entire book, titled All I Want is a Damn Cosy Armchair and My Books.

The title would need some tweaking, but you get the idea.

Is that too much to ask?

I’ve griped enough about the way life hasn’t exactly unfolded the way I was expecting so for now we’ll just focus on how:

• I wish I had more of my books with me

• I wish I had a comfortable place to read them

• I wish I had more time to read them

• I wish more people in general would read, especially my books (!)

• I wish I could have my own secondhand bookstore and live upstairs

• I wish I could sleep easier at night and not panic over the books I’ll never get round to reading

How this fits into my social media strategy/dilemma (or lack thereof)

Previous posts discussed My Social Media Dilemma (Feb 1) and My Dark Descent into Social Media Hell (Mar 10)

The long and short of it: I still haven’t got any fucking idea what I’m doing. As a serious FOMO sufferer who can’t seem to master the art of simplicity, I’ve gone down so many rabbit holes with tutorials and articles and whatnot and now my algorithm is all screwed up, feeding me ads for all sorts of questionable products and ideas. I can’t help wanting to cover all my bases and explore every possibility for fear I’m missing something.

Remember, kids, my goal is to make a living from writing. And as much as I’d like to focus on just writing, my target audience is kind of scattered all over the place. I’m trying to find where all the language learners hang out (and whether they even read or not). Also, my books straddle different niches, which adds to the challenge of marketing them/myself.

This means playing around with TikTok and Instagram and trying my best to do it on my own terms, having as much fun with it as I can while minimising the workload. As

Lucy Werner

put it in this insightful interview with

Amanda B. Hinton

, the key is “promoting our work in a way that’s actually fun for us – and makes our audience feel good, too.”

Because I know many people aren’t thrilled with more and more video appearing on Substack, I’m keeping all this content in its own separate section and on my YouTube channel. Subscribe to me there: YouTube:@danielpuzzoEnglish

There will be occasional posts on Drinkglish as well, and you can have a look at the first one. It’ll brighten your day – I hope – and takes less than a minute to ‘read’:

Drinkglish Post 1: Funny Grammar [Mis-] Translations

I won’t be emailing Drinkglish to you – your inboxes are cluttered enough as it is. I’ll just remind you from time to time when I’ve posted stuff. Occasionally I’ll do a crossover post on my regular page. Maybe.

Have I mentioned that I don’t know what the [expletive] I’m doing?

Other tidbits, exciting and otherwise

1 I’ve added a Start Here! Table of Contents page, where all my posts are neatly categorised.

Start Here! (a Table of Contents)

2 I had an article published in The Font (A Literary Journal for Language Teachers) and it’s all down to

Jayne Marshall

, who is now demanding my first-born male heir as compensation (spoiler alert: there’s no way in hell that’s happening)

Read it here

3 Social media updates

I’ve been trying to post a 2-3 minute Reel and TikTok every few days, with varying success. I have a mere 35 TikTok followers and the views for some videos are in the 700-800 views range. Is that good? I have no idea.

Here’s one example:

And another:

By the way, tell me if you think I’m an asshole. The above TikTok was inspired by the British tennis player Harriet Dart asking her French opponent to put on deodorant. I don’t get the fuss - what’s wrong with this? Believe me, I’ve been in some smelly classrooms with teenagers and it is NOT PLEASANT AT ALL and it hits you right in the back of the throat. It’s vile. Why on earth did she apologise?

This gave me a chuckle. Apparently one of the 724 people to date who have watched this searched for:

What’s there to say, other than you “you stink!” and “put on some damn deodorant you smelly beast!”

On the off chance you want to watch me make a fool of myself regularly, though don’t expect any lip-syncing or dancing around the kitchen with a broom as a microphone: www.tiktok.com/@danielpuzzogrumpy

Thanks for reading and if you’re up for a drink and a laugh (and even a serious chat about life-changing topics), you know where to find me 😁

1. There’s a style of teaching called Dogme, tenuously related to the Danish film movement inspired by Lars Von Trier, which aims to “create films based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, while excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology” (Wikipedia). In English teaching, this approach means materials-light, and relying on what happens naturally with students in the class. Language is meant to emerge naturally and unpredictably. It has its fair share of critics, including one who called it “winging it elevated to an art form.”