Commenting on developments in the English language
Author: Kate Woodford
I'm a freelance lexicographer and writer, living in Cambridge, UK. I worked for many years on Cambridge University Press’s range of ELT dictionaries and now work with Liz Walter on dictionary and non-dictionary titles. My other interests include fashion, cooking, child-rearing, BBC Radio 4 and the quirks and peculiarities of the English language. You can follow me on Twitter @Katewoodford2
This week, I’m looking at the language we use to say that things or people are similar, either in appearance or character. There are a tremendous lot of interesting words and phrases in this area so this post will be in two parts. Continue reading “Alike and analogous (Talking about similarities, Part 1)”→
It’s said that the artist Andy Warhol once predicted that in the future, everyone would be world-famous for 15 minutes. We can’t say for certain what he meant by this. Perhaps he was reflecting on the desire that so many people have to be famous. Given this desire and the great level of interest in the lives of famous people, it is not surprising that there is a lot of vocabulary in this area. Continue reading “World-famous and newfound fame (Collocations of ‘famous’ and ‘fame’)”→
In this week’s post, I’m looking at words for fairly minor injuries – the sort of injuries that most of us get now and then as we go about our lives (even though we may try hard not to).
Let’s start with that most common of injuries, the bruise. A bruise is an area of the skin that is darker than usual as a result of falling or being hit with something. The adjective is bruised and if you have a lot of bruises on your body – or a part of it – you might use the idiom black and blue:
Her right leg is covered in bruises. / She has a very bruised shoulder.
My shoulder and arm were black and blue where I hit the pavement.
Staying with this injury, if someone has bruises around the eye area because they have been hit there, you can call it a black eye. (An informal word for this is a shiner.)
He’d got into a fight at the weekend and had a black eye.
You’re going to have a real shiner in the morning!
The word gash is used for a long, deep cut in the skin. It is a noun and a verb:
He had a nasty gash in his arm that needed stitches. / She’d gashed her leg on a sharp piece of rock.
Meanwhile, the noun scratch refers to a very shallow cut made to the skin with something sharp. Scratch is also a verb:
I had various scratches on my arm from the cat. / I scratched myself on the roses.
(To express surprise that someone was not injured at all in a bad accident, you can say that they emerged/escaped/walked away, etc. without a scratch: Amazingly, he escaped without a scratch.)
If you graze or scrape part of the body (typically the knee), you break the surface of the skin by rubbing against something rough. Worse, if you skin an area of the body, you rub off an area of skin in an accident. Graze and scrape are also nouns:
He’d fallen over and grazed his knee./ Her legs were covered with scrapes and bruises.
Unfortunately, she slipped on the rocks and skinned her arm.
When cuts, scratches and grazes start to heal, the hard, brown layer that forms over them is called a scab and an area of the body with lots of scabs isscabby:
She has a big scab on her knee. / Look at your scabby knees!
If you bump part of your body (typically your head), you hit it against something hard. An injury (often raised and bruised) caused in this way is a bump:
I bumped my head as I was getting out of the car.
He’s got a really nasty bump on his forehead.
Finally, a part of the body that is larger than normal as a result of an injury may be described as swollen:
My ankle is really red and swollen.
That’s it for minor injuries. I hope very much you get through the week ahead without so much as a scrape or a scratch!
If you’ve resolved to achieve something that requires a lot of effort in 2024, then this post is for you! Today I’m looking at idioms and phrases that we use to talk about making an effort. If you didn’t already know this, ‘make an effort‘ (= try hard) is a phrase itself, for example:
This week, we’re looking at alternatives to the word advice, including single word near-synonyms and phrases. We’ll start by considering the noun ‘advice’ itself because it has some nice collocations. You give advice and you get advice. If you do what someone advises you to do, you take or follow their advice: Continue reading “Hints, hacks and pointers (Words meaning ‘advice’)”→