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by Liz Walter
My last post looked at phrases containing the word ‘end’ in the sense of the part that is furthest from the centre of something. Today’s post looks at phrases containing the word ‘end’ in its other main sense: the final part of something such as an activity or a period of time.
If something is at an end, it is finished and if it comes to an end, it finishes. On the other hand, if there is no end to something, it will never finish:
Eventually the rescuers arrived and her ordeal was at an end.
That period of my life was about to come to an end.
There seems to be no end to the conflict.
In the end, means finally, for instance at the end of a series of events or after a long discussion. We sometimes describe the point where something starts to get worse until it finishes or fails completely as the beginning of the end:
I made several attempts to call her, but in the end I went to her house.
It was the beginning of the end for our band when the drummer left.
If you do something to/until the bitter end, you continue until it is finished or completed, usually facing great problems or knowing that the result will be bad:
Their opponents had by far the better team, but they fought to the bitter end.
If you say that something is not the end of the world, you mean that it isn’t the worst thing that could happen. We sometimes use this phrase to imply that someone is making too much fuss about something. If someone comes to/meets a sticky end, they die in an unpleasant way. This phrase is slightly humorous, and shouldn’t be used in serious situations:
I know you’re upset about missing the show, but it’s not the end of the world.
The character comes to a sticky end when his car blows up.
I’ll finish with a very common phrase. When people are discussing a situation, they often finish with the phrase at the end of the day, followed by what they consider to be the most important fact about it:
You can complain about the driving test as much as you like, but at the end of the day, if you want to drive, you have to do it.
As you can see from this and my previous post, there are an incredible number of English phrases with the word ‘end’. Is this the same in your language?
