Idioms Galore

A new activity is available on RoadToGrammar.com

This idiom quiz lets you practice 150 commonly used idioms. The questions come up at random and you get a running total of your score.

The URL is: www.roadtogrammar.com/idioms

What is an idiom?

An idiom is any phrase where the words themselves do not convey the actual meaning. For example, we can say that a job is a 'piece of cake'. We are not talking about dessert! 'Piece of cake' is an idiom for 'easy', so when we say a job is a piece of cake, we mean that it is an easy job.

Into it, over it, with it, done with it

It’s not the long words in English that are confusing, it’s the short ones:

Example 1:

Jack: What kind of stuff are you into?

Jill: I’m really into kickboxing.

(If you’re into it, it means you enjoy it as a kind of hobby.)

Example 2:

Jack: Are you still upset about me breaking your mug?

Jill: No, I’m over it.

(If you’re over it, it means you have stopped being upset about it. Sometimes we say, ‘gotten over it’)

Example 3:

Jack: Fred told me he didn’t know what an MP3 was!

Jill: He’s not really with it, is he?

(If you’re not with it, it means you are not very clever or up-to-date. This phrase is most often used in the negative.)

Example 4:

Jack: Can I borrow your iPad?

Jill: Sure. I’m done with it for today.

(If you’re done with it, it means you are finished with it. We sometimes say, ‘through with it’ as an alternative.)

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Suppose and Supposed to

Here's an odd phrase: 'supposed to'

Have you ever wondered what it means?

When we use the word 'suppose', it means 'think':

I suppose so = I think so (but I'm not sure)

However, when we use it in the phrase 'supposed to', the meaning changes and, in fact, there is more than one meaning.

1 A rule which is often broken

Example: We are not supposed to bring our cellphones to class.

This means the rule is often broken - student often disregard the rule and bring their cellphones to class

2 Reputation

Example: He is supposed to be the best runner on the team.

People say that he is the best runner on the team

3 A rule, commitment or appointment that has been broken

Example: He is supposed to be here. Where is he? (He didn't show up)

Student Questions: Pronunciation or Pronounciation?

One of my students asked which is correct: pronunciation or pronounciation?

The answer is 'pronunciation'. And it is pronounced the way it is spelled.

Did you know that 'misspelling' is one of the most misspelled words?
And mispronunciation is one of the most mispronounced words!

Meaning of AT LARGE

I found this on Yahoo Answers and wanted to share it:

Q: Where does the expression 'at large' originate, when referring to escaped criminals?

A: The original meaning of the word "large" included, "abundant, copious, plentiful, liberal" (from the Latin largus), so that "at large" meant "liberated, free". Today, "large" simply means "big" and all the variants of "big", but not "free". But the old idiom "at large" meaning "free" survives on.


Interesting!








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Frosty

Feeling in the Christmas spirit?

Why not learn the lyrics to a Christmas song? It's fun and it'll help you improve your English.

Where is the word OK from?

(From Yahoo Answers)

1839, only survivor of a slang fad in Boston and New York c.1838-9 for abbreviations of common phrases with deliberate, jocular misspellings (cf. K.G. for "no go," as if spelled "know go"); in this case, "oll korrect." Further popularized by use as an election slogan by the O.K. Club, New York boosters of Democratic president Martin Van Buren's 1840 re-election bid, in allusion to his nickname Old Kinderhook, from his birth in the N.Y. village of Kinderhook. Van Buren lost, the word stuck, in part because it filled a need for a quick way to write an approval on a document, bill, etc. The noun is first attested 1841; the verb 1888. Spelled out as okeh, 1919, by Woodrow Wilson, on assumption that it represented Choctaw okeh "it is so" (a theory which lacks historical documentation); this was ousted quickly by okay after the appearance of that form in 1929. Okey-doke is student slang first attested 1932. Greek immigrants to America who returned home early 20c. having picked up U.S. speech mannerisms were known in Greece as okay-boys, among other things.

H.L. Mencken once described "O.K." as "the most successful of Americanisms," an estimation verified by U.S. troops during the Second World War, who reported encountering the phrase all over the world. Of all the scores of theories (and sub-theories) as to the origin of "O.K.," the most widely heard traces "O.K." to the "O.K. Club," a political committee supporting Martin Van Buren's unsuccessful bid for the Presidency in 1840. The "O.K.," it is said, was short for "Old Kinderhook," Van Buren's nickname.

It appears that this theory is not so much wrong (the "O.K. Club" certainly existed) as it is incomplete. Chances are good the Van Buren's partisans would never have named their club "O.K." had the phrase not already been widely known as an abbreviation of "oll korrect," a humorous misspelling of "all correct." American speech in the early 1800s was awash in similar abbreviations, two of which, "N.G." ("no good") and "P.D.Q." ("Pretty Damn Quick"), are still heard today.

Ironically, while "O.K." didn't save Van Buren's campaign, the campaign gave "O.K." a new lease on life -- until then, it had never been as popular as a competing phrase, "O.W." (for "oll wright"). (By the way, before we start feeling too superior to the cornball 1800s, is "oll wright" really any worse than the "excuuuse me!" or "not!" fads of a few years ago?).

OK is without doubt the best-known and widest-travelled Americanism, used and recognised even by people who hardly know another word of English. Running in parallel with its popularity have been many attempts to explain where it came from — amateur etymologists have been obsessed with OK and theories have bred unchecked for the past 150 years.

Prescribe vs Proscribe

To prescribe is to advise or recommend someone to do something, or to impose something authoritatively.

A doctor can prescribe a certain medicine for you (recommend that you take it) by writing you a prescription for it (i.e. its name and details of how you should take it), to be given to a pharmacist.

In addition, he may prescribe (advise) that you take some exercise, e.g. a brisk walk for half an hour daily, for your general health.

When a law prescribes something, it means it imposes something authoritatively on everyone in the country. For example, in certain countries, the law prescribes that parents are responsible for the actions of their non-adult children. So if their children do something against the law, the parents are taken to court and tried.

To proscribe something, on the other hand, means to forbid something through the law of a country, or regulations of certain bodies.

For example, athletes taking part in Olympic games are proscribed from taking certain drugs to improve their performance.

As the Concise Oxford Dictionary (1995) points out, it is important to see the difference between prescribed drugs (recommended by a doctor) and proscribed drugs (banned substances).

(courtesy of thestar.com.my)

21 Accents

This is a great video showing 21 different accents (mostly) in English.

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RoadtoGrammar.com now has a Twitter page and is looking for followers to engage in discussions related to grammar and ESL.

English learners, Twitter is a great way to know what is going on in the world and improve your English at the same time.

Follow RoadToGrammar at twitter.com/roadtogrammar

Going crazy with idioms!

In English, if you want to say that someone is crazy, you have a lot of choices! We have many idioms for calling people crazy and some of them are very colorful!

You can say that someone is:

Crazy
Mad
Insane
Deranged
Mentally unsound
Loony
Loopy
Nuts
Daft (UK English)
Bananas
Bonkers
Out of his mind
Nutty
A basket case

or that someone...
has lost his marbles
is one can short of a six-pack
is a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic
has a screw loose

Looks great on a projector!

A lot of teachers are lucky enough to have a laptop and projector set up in the classroom and with an internet connection too.

Heads up! Roadtogrammar.com is perfect for use with a projector! Project the quizzes onto the screen and go over the questions and answers with the entire class. I do it all the time and it really gets the students focussed.

Since almost every grammar topic is covered on roadtogrammar.com, it's a great resource that you can use anytime.

A new word every 98 minutes

New words are coined in English all the time. However, I didn't realize how many until I read this article on the BBC website.

Apparently a new word is created every 98 minutes and there are already one million words in English.

Wow!

The nature of communication

I have been reading up on linguistics and also reading about different definitions of communication. So far I haven’t found one that I am satisfied with, so I’m going to make my own:

Communication is a tool that we use to interact with the world around us.

When we are babies, we learn to interact with the world around us using our five senses, we see things, hear things, taste things, smell things and touch things. Perhaps communication is a sixth sense (no pun intended). Just as we poke at something with a finger to see how it reacts, we later poke at things with utterances to see how they react. As we grow, utterances become words, words become phrases, phrases become metaphors and so on. Hence when we communicate, we are not sending a message and waiting for a reply, we are sending an action and waiting for a reaction.

Take for example, the angry customer who shouts at the waiter. He isn’t sending a message. He is battering the poor waiter as a release for his frustrations and insecurities. When he sees the waiter react in an ‘appropriate way’, he stops. He then goes on to tell his dinner partners how you have to be tough with ‘these people’. Clearly, this communication is about psychology and status; even about causing pain and hurt.

Okay, from theory to practice. All this is nice, but how is it going to help us teach English? As we know, the communicative method is widely used in language teaching and one of the staples of the communicative method is role play. But how often do we give realistic role play scenarios to our students?
A typical role play may be a customer in a shop and it goes something like this:

Shopkeeper: How may I help you?
Customer: I would like to buy some sausages, please.
Shopkeeper: Certainly. How many would you like to buy…?

This kind of role play teaches communication as a way to send and receive messages. But when I go into a shop, the interaction is something more like the following. (I should add that I live in a country where English is spoken, but as a second language.)

Shopkeeper: (Sees me, recognizes that I am a foreigner, prepares to act accordingly)
Me: (Sizes up shopkeeper, wonder whether shopkeeper can speak good English or whether I should try another language, which would put me at a disadvantage.)
Shopkeeper: Hah? (local way of saying ‘Yes?’)
Me: Do you have sausages? (speaking slowly, still unsure how much English the shopkeeper speaks)
Shopkeeper: Sausages? (in case he heard me incorrectly)
Me: Yes. Four, please. (now confident that shopkeeper can speak English, but thinking to myself ‘this guy isn’t very polite, is he?’)
Shopkeeper: Three dollars. (plops bag on counter, thinks ‘I wonder if he’s American. I don’t like Americans since they invaded Iraq.’)
Me: ‘kay. (I’d usually say thank you, but since this guy is pretty rough and ready, I won’t bother.)

Of course, this is an interaction between a native speaker and a non-native speaker in a country where English is spoken as a second language. You may be thinking that your interactions with shopkeepers are rather different. But the point is that these conversations do not follow ‘textbook English’. So we owe it to our students to make role plays a little deeper. Give the characters some attitude. Put them in a socio-cultural setting. It’s not hard and it may even teach the students extra vocabulary. It will definitely help them to form a link between what they experience in English class and what they experience ‘on the street’.

So that is just one way that we can improve our teaching by taking a more realistic view of communication. Know any more? Feel free to leave a comment below.

You, You, You and You.

Did you know that the word, ‘you’ has at least four meanings?

1 The first use is of ‘you’ as the second person singular:

Jack, where are you going?

We are talking to Jack and you refers to Jack. Hundreds of years ago, English speakers used the word, ‘thou’ as the second person singular and distinguished it from the second person plural, but this was lost in time.


2 The second use of you is the second person plural.

Class, you must complete your homework on time.

We are talking directly to a group of people and we refer to them by you (and your).


3 Next, we have something called the ‘generic you’. Although this is rarely mentioned in grammar books, it is extremely common. The generic you means ‘anyone’:

You can’t make a cake without eggs.

A more formal way of saying this is to use ‘one’:

One can’t make a cake without eggs.

In fact, this is called the ‘generic one’.

English learners first come across the generic you when they learn basic classroom language:

How do you spell that?
How do you pronounce that?

Perhaps that accounts for the common mistake:

How to spell that?

Learners feel that ‘you’ does not make sense, so they substitute it with ‘to’. But the reason it does not seem to make sense is that they have not yet learned the ‘generic you’. Of course, even advanced level students and teachers may not be aware of the generic you.

4 The final use of you is to talk about oneself. Consider this exchange:

Billy: How are you holding up since Linda passed away?

Grampa: Well, you do get lonely sometimes, but I will persevere.

Notice the use of you to distance the speaker from a sensitive topic. Once again, we could use ‘one’ in its place or we could just say ‘I’:

Well, one does get lonely sometimes, but I will persevere.
Well, I do get lonely sometimes, but I will persevere.

This last usage is the least common.