Comments for Macmillan

Comment on Forget crikey! Nothin’ more Aussie than a cuppa and a bikkie by SharonC

SharonC — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:34:08 +0000

Is that just Aussie English though? It’s been happening to me for as long as I can remember…

Comment on Forget crikey! Nothin’ more Aussie than a cuppa and a bikkie by Brendan

Brendan — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 08:46:46 +0000

“Sickie” for sick-day also springs to mind.

Another interesting area is with nicknames in Australia, removing the end of names with a double r and adding -zza. Barry becomes “Bazza”, Sharron “Shazza”, Garry “Gazza”, etc.

Comment on What’s your favourite English word? by Steohan Hughes

Steohan Hughes — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 12:04:12 +0000

Hey Ricardo,

You’re absolutely right about the word HUMONGOUS; in fact, it sounds like an invented word and when I hear it I think of something big and clumsy, a juggernaut.

Comment on Australians wear thongs on their feet! by Crystal

Crystal — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:08:54 +0000

Isn’t “cark it” included in Brit Eng as well?

Comment on Netting, texting, impacting and sheeting through the centuries – more about verbing and nouning by dan

dan — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 09:13:11 +0000

Interesting stuff, thanks.

Children do a lot of this conversion when they’re about 3 or 4 with lots of references in acquisition books to things like “I’ve jammed my bread” or (more like using derivational morphology than conversion, I suppose) “It’s very nighty” (talking about darkness). My own kids have started doing weird things with “versus”, so they make it into a verb and ask things like “Who are England versing tonight?”. Maybe it’s just a form of linguistic creativity which is common to us as a species.

Comment on What’s your favourite English word? by Ricardo Razo

Ricardo Razo — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 18:30:34 +0000

My favourite word is “HUMONGOUS”because I think the way it sounds already expresses what it means!

Comment on Australians wear thongs on their feet! by Barbara

Barbara — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 18:08:27 +0000

Yes, I also grew up in St Louis saying thongs for flip-flops of today. Thong simply got a new meaning in the lingerie department…….much later.

I teach a course on English-speaking countries, and I often tell students that Australia is a British-based country with American orientation (often due to the size of the country, history, attitude, etc).

Comment on ELF and safety by Nuria Beascoechea

Nuria Beascoechea — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 17:19:09 +0000

I believe that English language should progress and develop in a way that its grammatical rules are neither manipulated and thus nor damaged.

To put an example, it is acceptable to introduce new phrasal adverbs that are associated with contemporary technology and other words which are linked to the world of business. However, it would be wrong to introduce the lingua franca as the new grammatical landmark.

Comment on Mugged at a gunpoint by Raffaella Cantillo

Raffaella Cantillo — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 09:56:20 +0000

It does read non-native, possibly sounding a bit like a German writing in English? But then again you can’t be sure..as a non native speaker of English I do tend to take notice of small mistakes like the ones mentioned above. It sounds like your fake ‘friend’ read a lot but maybe practiced spoken/written English less..he/she might not even be aware of the subtle differences that local accents represent, not to speak of spelling variations such as those you mention here (British English v. American English). These are tell-tale mistakes which will spot even a good user of the English language as non-native! And they are not easy to correct either! But then I suppose you wouldn’t want to correct a fraudster! Cheers, Raffaella

EFL Teacher, South of Italy

Comment on Food for thought … by Jonathan Marks

Jonathan Marks — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:33:33 +0000

Old English had a liquid equivalent of ‘feed’: the causative verb ‘drencan’, corresponding to ‘drincan’ (= ‘drink’).
(See http://www.macmillandictionaries.com/med-magazine/February2006/35-Feature-Spread-Word.htm )
‘Drencan’ is the ancestor of the modern word ‘drench’, which has of course a rather different, though related, meaning.

Modern German has ‘tränken’, meaning to give water to animals, and also to soak/impregnate. Swedish has ‘dränka’ (transitive), meaning to drown, soak, etc. (literally and metaphorically) and coresponding to ‘dricka’, meaning to drink, and ‘drunkna’ (intransitive), meaning to drown.

Pairs of morphologically-related active / causative verbs are an old feature of Germanic languages. There are relatively few in modern English, compared with German – examples include sit/set, lie/lay, fall/fell, rise/raise. In the case of drink/drench, the divergence of meaning has left the lexical gap that Andrew mentions.