In this weekly microblog, we bring to English language learners more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult.

This week’s language tip helps with ways in which you can apologize or accept an apology.

Ways of apologizing
Sorry / I’m sorry:  the usual way of apologizing to someone you know well
I do apologize for… : a more polite and formal way of apologizing, used especially when you feel responsible for something that someone else has done
Excuse me: used when apologizing for something you did accidentally
I beg your pardon: a more formal way of apologizing for something you did accidentally
I/​We owe you an apology: used when you realize you have treated someone badly, for example by blaming them for something that is not their fault
Please accept my/​our apologies: used when making a written or formal apology
I/​We regret…:  used when making an apology in an official announcement
Examples:
I’m sorry I’m late, Amy. I missed the train.  ♦  I’m sorry, I didn’t quite hear what she said.
I do apologize for Julie’s behaviour. She’s normally so reliable.
Oh,  excuse me, I didn’t see you standing there.
I beg your pardon, I didn’t mean to interrupt.
We’ve discovered who the thief was, and it seems we  owe you an apology.
We accept that this was the company’s fault and  ask you to accept our sincere apologies.
My apologies if I have offended you in any way.
We regret to announce that tonight’s performance of ‘La Traviata’ has been cancelled.
Ways of accepting an apology
That’s quite all right / There’s no need to apologize: used when telling someone that you do not mind what they have done
No problem: used when telling someone you know well that you do not mind what they have done
Examples:
‘I’m sorry I’m late.’ ‘ That’s quite all right, I’ve only been waiting for a minute.’  ♦  There’s no need to apologize, it was an easy mistake to make.
‘I’m sorry I can’t help you.’ ‘ No problem, I’ll ask Rory.’

More language tips

Browse the list under the ‘language tips‘ tag here on the blog for more useful language tips.

Would you like to improve your vocabulary? Follow our daily tweets @RedEnglishWords or visit our Learn English Facebook Page.

In this weekly microblog, we bring to English language learners more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult.

This week’s language tip helps with key words which are used for talking or writing about names.

first name / given name: a personal name that you are given when you are born. Another British word is Christian name: The children call me Mrs. Jones, but actually my first name is Mary.
last name: your family name. The usual British word is surname: Let me spell my last name for you.
middle name: the name that comes after your first name but is not often used except to identify you formally. Another British word is second name: My second name is Victoria, after my grandmother.
maiden name: a woman’s last name before she was married: I still use my maiden name for work purposes.
nickname: an invented name that other people call you, especially when you are young: His nickname was Penguin because of the way he walked.
stage name: a name that actors use in their professional career that is different from their real name: She thought Joan Smith was too boring, so she decided to use the stage name Maria Vitalez.
nom de plume / pen name / pseudonym: a name that writers sometimes use so that their real identity is not known: She wrote all her detective novels under the pen name Barbara Greensmith.
initials: the first letters of each of your names: His initials H.I. were carved on the side of the desk.
title: an official name that you put in front of your own name that shows your status in society: Officially my title is Doctor Jones, but most people just call me Janet. ♦ When his father dies he will have the title of Duke of Cumberland.
alias: a false name that someone, especially a criminal, uses to keep their real identity secret: He went under several aliases, including Bernard Kopf and Harold Gene.

More language tips

Browse the list under the ‘language tips‘ tag here on the blog for more useful language tips.

Would you like to improve your vocabulary? Follow our daily tweets @RedEnglishWords or visit our Learn EnglishFacebook Page.

In this weekly microblog, we bring to English language learners more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult.

This week’s language tip helps with the noun knowledge.

Knowledge is an uncountable noun, so it is never used in the plural:
✗ Students don’t understand how to use these knowledges in real life.
✓ Students don’t understand how to use this knowledge in real life.
✗ We can exchange our experiences and strengthen our knowledges.
✓ We can exchange our experiences and strengthen our knowledge.
Knowledge is sometimes used with a, but only in the pattern a knowledge of something (or a good/deep/thorough etc. knowledge of something):
Effective use of language necessitates a good knowledge of grammar.
The usual preposition that follows knowledge is of. Don’t use the prepositions in or on:
✗ It takes more than just knowledge in a subject to succeed.
✓ It takes more than just knowledge of a subject to succeed.
✗ This is where you can gain a general knowledge base, and specific knowledge on the subject you have chosen to study.
✓ This is where you can gain a general knowledge base, and specific knowledge of the subject you have chosen to study.
The preposition about can also be used with knowledge, but it is much less frequent than of.

More language tips

Browse the list under the ‘language tips‘ tag here on the blog for more useful language tips.

Would you like to improve your vocabulary? Follow our daily tweets @RedEnglishWords or visit our Learn English Facebook Page.

What do the months of January, April and July 2012 have in common? Here’s a clue: they might cause problems for anyone who suffers from paraskevidekatriaphobia. Still none the wiser? Okay, well, how about if I told you that any month in which the first day falls on a Sunday has a clash of day and date which makes some people feel rather uncomfortable?

If you haven’t already guessed, then the day I’m talking about is Friday and the date is the 13th, the one calendar milestone which causes inexplicable anxiety for anyone with superstitious tendencies. No one really knows why this date has such negative associations, but a fair few of us might confess to feeling a little bit spooked by the mention of it. Would you plan anything important for Friday 13th?

In this weekly microblog, we bring to English language learners more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult.

This week’s language tip helps with key words which are used for talking or writing about jobs.

general
job: what you do regularly to earn money, especially what you do for a particular company or person.
A full-time job is a job that you do for at least the same number of hours a week as people usually work.
A part-time job is a job that you do for fewer hours a week than people usually work: My first job was helping in a pet shop. ♦ a full-time bookkeeper ♦ He works full-time for the council. ♦ a part-time bartender ♦ I teach part-time now.
work: something that you do to earn money, or the place where you go to do it: I’ve got a lot of work on at the moment. ♦ Dan’s at work.
career: the jobs someone does over a period of time that involve a particular type of work: a long career in the civil service ♦ a medical career
profession: a type of job that you need a lot of education or special training to do, or all the people who do a particular job like this: I’m a doctor by profession. ♦ the legal profession
occupation: (formal) your usual job: What is your current occupation and salary?
post: a particular job within a company or organization, especially a job with some responsibility: She applied for the post of Senior Marketing Manager at Cadbury Schweppes.
position: a particular job: used especially in advertisements for available jobs: a vacancy for the position of night watchman
getting a job
apply: to officially say, usually in a letter or on a special form, that you would like to be considered for a particular job
CV: a list of your qualifications and work experience that you send to someone who you are hoping to work for
job seeker: (formal) someone who is looking for a job
applicant: someone who applies for a particular job
candidate: someone who is competing with other people for a particular job
interview: a meeting with the people you are hoping to work for where they ask you questions and find out more about you
interviewee: an applicant who is asked to come for an interview
leaving a job
resign: to officially say that you are going to leave your job
quit: (informal) to leave a job
sack or fire: to tell someone that they must leave their job, especially because their work is not good or they have done something wrong: She’s been fired for not meeting her sales targets.
make someone redundant: to tell someone that they no longer have a job because they are not needed any more
retire: to stop working, usually because you are old
not having a job
unemployed or jobless: used for describing someone who does not have a job but who would like to have one: used also as a noun for referring to people in this position as a group: a jobless welder ♦ Her brother has been unemployed for over a year. ♦ measures to help the unemployed find work
out of work: used for describing someone who does not have a job but who would like to have one: She’s been out of work for six months.
retired: used for describing someone who is not working because they are old: a retired army officer

More language tips

Browse the list under the ‘language tips‘ tag here on the blog for more useful language tips.

Would you like to improve your vocabulary? Follow our daily tweets @RedEnglishWords or visit our Learn English Facebook Page.

In this weekly microblog, we bring to English language learners more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult.

This week’s language tip helps with used to.

Don’t confuse
▪  I am used to doing something
▪  I used to do something
If you are used to doing something, it is familiar to you because you have often done it before. Use the -ing form of the verb in this pattern, not the infinitive:
✗ Looking through the newspapers every day, we are used to read terrifying reports about crimes.
✓ Looking through the newspapers every day, we are used to reading terrifying reports about crimes.
You can also say that you get used to doing something:
Children soon get used to spending much of their free time watching TV.
If you say that you used to do something, you are talking about an activity or habit in the past which has now finished.
I used to play squash reasonably well.
This means that the speaker no longer plays squash well.

More language tips

Browse the list under the ‘language tips‘ tag here on the blog for more useful language tips.

Would you like to improve your vocabulary? Follow our daily tweets @RedEnglishWords or visit our Learn English Facebook Page.

In this weekly microblog, we bring to English language learners more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult.

This week’s language tip helps with the verb make.

When make means ‘to cause or force someone to do something’ and is followed by another verb, use the infinitive without to:
✗ What makes them to commit crime?
✓ What makes them commit crime?
✗ Advertising makes us to buy a lot of unnecessary things.
✓ Advertising makes us buy a lot of unnecessary things.
But when make is in the passive, use the infinitive with to:
I feel the American people have been unfairly made to pay for the government’s mistakes.

More language tips

Browse the list under the ‘language tips‘ tag here on the blog for more useful language tips.

Would you like to improve your vocabulary? Follow our daily tweets @RedEnglishWords or visit our Learn English Facebook Page.

In this weekly microblog, we bring to English language learners more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult.

This week’s language tip helps with the word who.

Don’t confuse who’s (the short form of ‘who is’ or ‘who has’) with whose (the possessive form of ‘who’, meaning ‘of whom’ or ‘of which’):
✗ Who’s view of the facts are we getting through television?
✓ Whose view of the facts are we getting through television?
✗ …an international organization who’s role is to keep peace and stability.
✓ …an international organization whose role is to keep peace and stability.
The short form who’s (‘who is’ or ‘who has’) is used mainly in spoken English and informal writing:
‘Who’s going to do that?’ ‘You, of course.’
Who’s been using my computer?

More language tips

Browse the list under the ‘language tips‘ tag here on the blog for more useful language tips.

Would you like to improve your vocabulary? Follow our daily tweets @RedEnglishWords or visit our Learn English Facebook Page.

Newspaper headlines have the task of trying to convey the essence of a story in a very short space. To achieve this, they often compress the syntax, leaving out articles or other grammatical glue. With the absence of such glue, ambiguities can arise, as it’s not always easy to spot the part of speech of some of the words involved. A recent headline in my local paper read:

Bright sparks weather gala night power cut to party on

The problem here is that of the eight lexical words involved, five can be either a noun or a verb, and if you make one wrong assumption, you end up failing completely to understand what is meant.

Sparks, for example, could be the third person singular present tense of the verb spark, meaning to set off or initiate. That would require the word bright to be a noun, as this would be the subject of the verb, but bright doesn’t really have any noun uses in English. In fact, what we’re seeing here is a compound noun, bright sparks, meaning clever or lively people.

Weather can be either noun and verb, and this is the crucial word in this headline. Here, it’s a verb, meaning to endure or survive, and the meaning of the headline starts to become clear. The bright sparks survive a gala night power cut to party on. We still need to disentangle gala night power cut, and both power and cut are potentially nouns or verbs. Here, they’re both nouns, and we’re talking about a power cut that happens in the course of a night when a gala is being held. So the bright sparks survive a loss of electricity during their gala night… to party on. Party is yet another ambiguous word as far as its part of speech is concerned, and here it’s not just a verb, but a phrasal verb, formed by the addition of the particle on to add the extra meaning of continuation (see Michael Rundell’s recent post  in which he touches on the way in which particles can be used to form phrasal verbs with a predictable meaning).

So the meaning finally reveals itself as People attending a gala night survived a loss of electricity and continued to enjoy the party.

‘Prepositions are funny’, concluded the author of The Economist’s language blog in a recent post. You can see what he means, and any teacher (or learner) of English will sympathise. Choosing the ‘right’ preposition (or more broadly, the right particle) can be a challenge, and for some, the whole business seems so arbitrary that the only solution is to learn every combination one by one.

But one of our guiding principles at Macmillan Dictionaries is that language is never random, and that almost every aspect of it is ‘rule-governed’. The same point came up a few days back in Rachael Singh’s post for our ‘class English’ series. Discussing William Labov’s research with young African-Americans in New York City in the 1960s, Rachael notes how Labov demonstrated that their particular dialect of English (‘Black English Vernacular’) was ‘subject to its own strict rules of grammar that every speaker … obeyed’. It’s important to be clear what we mean by ‘rules’ in this context. We’re not talking about a set of instructions handed down by experts telling us what’s right and wrong, but what John Sinclair called ‘regularities’: recurrent features of language behaviour which we can identify by studying what people actually do when they communicate. By observing the language behaviour of one specific group, Labov was able to identify underlying ‘systems’ in the way they used words. And this is what linguists and lexicographers do at a more general level: analysing large amounts of corpus data to discover the systematic features of language.

Some language systems are easier to work out than others. English morphology, for example, is pretty straightforward: we know that you add –s to pluralise a noun or –ed to indicate a past tense, and although there are exceptions, even these have their own rules. Phrasal verbs, on the other hand, are a good example of a language feature where it seems as if there is no system at all. But when people make up new phrasal verbs, fluent speakers have no problem understanding them – and this tells us that everyone involved (the inventor and the audience) know what the rules are, even if they might have trouble explaining them. Several years ago, British celebrity chef Delia Smith announced that, after writing dozens of cookbooks, she was now ‘reciped out’. Although no one had ever used this verb before, everyone understood what she meant. If, conversely, she had been about to start writing a new cookbook and said she was ‘all reciped up’, we’d have understood that too.

How do we do this? Firstly, we understand new words by analogy with ones we already know: there are many other phrasal verbs using ‘out’ that express the idea of being exhausted or ‘having nothing left’: people can be worn out or burned out, for example, and a concert is sold out if all the tickets have gone. From here, we get newer expressions like ‘partied out’ (when you don’t feel like going to any more parties) – and ‘reciped out’.

But at a deeper level – following ‘rules’ which we don’t yet fully understand – there are reasons why ‘out’ (rather than ‘in’ or ‘up’, say) is the right particle for expressing this meaning. The key is metaphor, and its role in allowing us to generate new (often abstract) meanings from a ‘core’ meaning which is typically concrete. You can see this process at work not only with general vocabulary, but with prepositions and particles too. One of the common ways we use ‘out’ is to express the idea of removing something from the place where it is (as in ‘take it out of the box’ or ‘I’m throwing these newspapers out’). From here, we get the idea of getting rid of things so that there is less than before (which appears in phrasal verbs like weed out, filter out, or strip out), or so that nothing is left at all, as in empty out, wipe out – or recipe out.

In our phrasal verbs dictionary, we have used diagrams to explore the metaphorical behaviour of the 12 most common English particles (you can see the one for away here) and each diagram comes with a chart showing many of the phrasal verbs that embody the ideas in the diagram. These explanations are far from perfect – this is an area where more research is needed – but they do suggest that, even if prepositions are ‘funny’, they’re by no means random.