Neologisms: inventing new words and terms This is a question from Sandy in South Africa: Listen to the audio version of this post:https://english4today.com/wp-content/uploads/neologisms.m4a The Question Hello, English4Today, I’ve been struggling with a grammar issue for which I don’t seem to be able to find much information . Would you be able to assist me in this: If one were to create a word from a well-known person’s name (+ing) in order to describe a behaviour that this person is most known for, what would one call this? For example: Person: Juno Known for: shock-value antics Example sentence: Anna was Junoing as if gasps were just as essential as the air she breathed. How would the word ‘Junoing‘ be classified, grammatically? It has been suggested that it would be a gerund. However, seeing as gerunds are formed from verbs+ing – with ‘Juno’ being a noun and not a verb – would this be correct? The Answer Thanks for that great question, Sandy. Not only does it touch on a ...
Donuts! You might be wondering what that has to do with New Year or the English language – well read on and you’ll find out why Homer Simpson’s love of donuts may be his personal ‘lucky charm‘. First, Happy New Year to all of our listeners, readers, members of English4Today and English4Today students. When you’ve grown up in a Western culture, you probably think that New Year’s Day on January 1st is a pretty universal festival. After all, January 1st is the same all over the world so the new year starts at the same time everywhere. Well, in one sense this is true as the Gregorian Calendar (the 12 month calendar we now use) is used all over the world for commercial, transport and communications purposes. But a lot of cultures still keep a place for their own calendar and most of us know that Chinese New Year, for example, does not fall on the same day as the Gregorian Calendar proscribes and that the Chinese New Year festival is a party worth getting an invitation to. Celebrat...
Christmas vocabulary: what's behind the holiday? https://english4today.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/english4today_christmas.mp3 Yes, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas! And if you are in a country where Christianity is the dominant religion you will certainly see signs of it everywhere you go! Now, I don’t want to take the fun out of what is a really good holiday but Christmas is not everything that it seems to be.You may know it as one of the most important Christian festivals celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ but, like a lot of other festivals, there is a healthy influence from pre-Christian pagan festivals and a very good injection of pure capitalism into the mix that we now know as Christmas.Firstly, although December 25th is marked as the day that Jesus Christ was born it is also the day when the most important gods in the religions of Ishtar and Mithra had their birthdays. The Romans also had important winter festivals including the Saturnalia – apparently, w...
https://english4today.com/wp-content/uploads/patient-e4t-podcast.m4a Question from English4.today member Anna in Germany:“Why is a medical ‘patient‘ called a ‘patient‘ and what does it have to do with the adjective ‘patient‘ ?”Hi, Anna. That’s a really interesting question! What I love about questions from our members is that they often bring up English language topics that, as a native speaker, you haven’t thought about yourself.Let’s have a look at the word patient as a noun and as an adjective:* NOUN: He is a patient of Doctor Buller.* ADJECTIVE: I have had to wait for an hour. I think I am very patient.Anna, the word ‘patient‘ comes from the Latin originally. In Latin the wordpatiensis the present participle ofpati(to suffer or endure) – so you can see immediately how the modern English word ‘patient‘, someone suffering from an illness or injury and being cared for by a medical professional, gets its meaning.When ‘patient‘ is used as an adjective, as in ‘he is...
Question from English4.today member Enrique in Spain: What does the word ‘onomatopoeia’ mean… I’ve seen it and it is one of those weird english words that I find hard to understand”. Here is the answer, Enrique! Boom! Yes, that was an onomatopoeia. Not the sound itself but the word I used to describe it. Onomatopoeia are words that imitate the sound of the object or actions they are describing. Thus from this: [sound] we get ‘woof woof’. And from this [sound] we get ‘meow meow’. And from this [sound] we get the rather approximate ‘cock-a-doodle-do’. And from explosions, electrical sounds, fights, slamming doors, etcetera, we get a whole range of comic book filler vocabulary such as ‘bang!’, ‘pow!’, ‘slap!’,’zip!’, ‘boom!’ and ‘crash!’. You can see that some of these words like ‘boom’, a stock market boom, for example, or zip and crash have actually taken on a life of their own and refer not just to the originating sound but to a rapidly developing market, a ...
Question from Sahra in Brazil: What’s the difference between these sentences: * I’m married for 3 years. * I’ve been married for 3 years Answer Hi Sahra. This is a very quick one to answer as we have answered a lot of other questions about this subject and have sections of the English4Today Grammar on it as well. When you see ‘for‘ with a period or duration of time – as in ‘forthree years‘ or ‘fora long time‘ or ‘fortwo days‘ then you know that the verb will be in thePresent Perfect. We use thePresent Perfectwhen we are talking about something started in the past and continuing in the present. The structure of the the Present Perfect is: SUBJECT+HAVE/HAS+PAST PARTICIPLE OF VERB I+HAVE+BEEN MARRIED+ FOR TEN YEARS Your first sentence is therefore not correct and the second one is correct. Take a look at these references and explanations: · * Present Perfect· * Using For and Since·
Forming the Simple Past, sometimes called the Preterite tense, is really pretty easy… at least for regular verbs. You take the subject, follow it with the verb ending in –ed and there you have it. Example:Subject + verb + –edI + play +edI played And, to make it easier, the Simple Past form is invariable – that means it doesn’t change no matter what subject you use. Let’s look at the verb ‘to play’, in the Simple Past it would look like this: I playedYou playedHe, she, it playedWe playedYou playedThey played A couple of things to watch out for: * Verbs ending in a consonant + y, like cry and try: drop the y and add ied. * Verbs ending in e like receive only need to have the ‘d’ added – received. For the irregular verbs in English it is a bit more difficult and you will need to learn most of the most often used ones. There is a full list of irregular verbs with their past form on English4Today. Now, before moving to the next video where we talk about when to use the Simple ...
Question from Jadie in the USA How would the word hunter be spelled in the following sentence?The sentence might go something like, “The hunter’s steel trap secured my foot to the forest floor.”Would the correct spelling be hunters, hunter’s, or hunters’?Thank you for your time,Jadie Hi Jadie, your question is asking how we form the possessive in English and I’d put this question in the Top 10 of questions we get asked. I’ll run through it quickly in relation to your specific example and I’ve put several links at the end of this posting to other postings about the possessive and to the section in the English4Today Online Grammar on possessives. Firstly, I’m assuming that there is only one ‘hunter’ in which case we would show that the trap belongs to the hunter by saying the ‘hunter’s trap‘ – that is with the apostrophe s following the ‘r’ of ‘hunter’. So this sentence is correct: The hunter‘s steel trap secured my foot to the forest floor. Just as an extra note h...
Question from Mural Mahtab in Iran: What are the differences between these adjectives: very, rather, quite, fairly, extremely, terribly? Which one is the strongest? Thanks a million Answer: Hi Mural, thanks for the question. Your question focuses on another rather (or should I say, ‘fairly‘ or ‘quite‘) difficult area of English. Firstly, although these words are often placed in front of a noun or adjective – as in ‘He is a very good student’ – they are not adjectives themselves but are adverbs. To be even more accurate, they are adverbs of degree . They tell us to what extent, or how much, an action happened. Look at these examples using some of the common adverbs of degree that you have included in your question: * It was a very hot day. * Irene is a rather good musician. * Muktar plays the sitar extremely well. * Pablo and Hector are very good friends. * Some northern countries such as Sweden have terribly long winters. You can see that in example 1 we have an adjective ‘...
Question from Heather in the USA Which one is correct – theatre or theater? Hi Heather – well it all depends on where you live! Have a look at the article in the English4Today Online English Grammar called ‘Which English?’ to give you more details. The spelling of words such as ‘theatre‘ and ‘centre‘ differ depending on where you are in the English speaking world. In the USA and Canada it is ‘theater‘ and ‘center‘ and in Britain it is theatre and centre are spelt. There are quite a few of these variations which is one of the reasons why we have an ‘American English Dictionary’, ‘Australian English Dictionary’ and a ‘British English Dictionary’. The important thing to remember is that none of the variations is more correct than another! And if you are a non-native English speaker living outside of one of the usage regions you can really take your pick without feeling that you are making a mistake! Here’s a short list of some of the main variations between British s...