improve your English
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Posted by Beth Penfold on February 08, 2011
It would seem that many of you are involved in some sort of legal wrangle at present. The word hitherto has recently been searched for rather a lot in Macmillan Dictionary and this is a classic legal term – hence my suspicion! I like this word and think that rather than it being unusual and nebulous, it is well-suited to [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on February 03, 2011
Ah…rest, we could all do with a bit more of it and yet it can be such a rare commodity in our busy modern lives. The title of this article lists three words starting with rest…but beware! – one of these words has a quite different meaning. Restful, a lovely word describing something that helps you to chill out. When you reach [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on February 01, 2011
Two words that seem to get commonly mixed up are wary and weary. These two words have very different meanings and so are not interchangeable, but it doesn’t stop people from doing it. Most often, people use weary when they mean wary. Here are some annoying sentences that have insulted my ears recently: I’m quite weary [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on January 31, 2011
This article from a recent Language and words in the news caught my eye. It talks about the most annoying marketing words used today, and let’s face it, there are plenty of them. I have a particular vested interest here, though, because I used to work in marketing, and even though it was many years [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on January 28, 2011
How do you start off your emails, and do you always feel comfortable doing it that way? The question of whether to use ‘Dear’, ‘Hi’ or just the person’s name has come up many times, most recently here. It’s certainly a tricky one. ‘Hi’ sounds too informal in many cases, but ‘Dear’ seems overly formal [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on January 27, 2011
Check out my new word, ‘thermosemantic’. I’ve just created it to explain the sudden rash of meaningless catchphrases and soundbites coming from our British politicians at the moment. I can see what they’re trying to achieve - they want to classify the British electorate into nice little sections that can be fed the political messages the politicians think [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on January 25, 2011
In this post (my second on ‘words on your mind’), I see that you have all been out having a great time without me again. You gave yourselves away by so many of you searching for the term fun-filled in Macmillan Dictionary recently. Fun-filled is a lovely compound adjective used to describe something that is [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on January 19, 2011
English is full of set phrases and idioms, and the more of these a student knows and can confidently use, the more fluent he or she will sound. As the meaning of an idiom often cannot be correctly guessed just from the words themselves, however, idioms need to be learnt as a whole. To help [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on January 18, 2011
Check out this witty piece from the BBC about the anti-tech words developing as a wry backlash to all the technical/IT ones currently entering the lexicon. A similarly entertaining experience can be had in the Macmillan Open Dictionary. We already have a good number of technological terms and slang, both ironic and factual. I especially love attachmeant, [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on January 17, 2011
Getting to know and confidently use the most common words in English is key to success as a language learner. Three of the most common English verbs are get, go and take. Once students know how to use these words, their vocabulary and general communication skills will quickly develop. To help in the process, here’s [...]
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