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Do you know someone who is ‘good in a crisis’ – someone who stays admirably calm in difficult circumstances when the people around them are too stressed to make good decisions? Perhaps you are good in a crisis. This week, I’m looking at all the words and phrases we use to talk about such people.
Continue reading “Calm and collected (The language of staying calm in a crisis)”
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by Liz Walter
We all know that there’s no such thing as a perfect life. Even people who are generally happy and successful will always have some experiences that make them upset or frustrated. Today’s post looks at the language we use when we speak about this.
Continue reading “Taking the rough with the smooth: talking about imperfect situations”
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This week’s blog post is a companion to one that I published last month on ways of talking about luck. Today’s post focuses on the language of chance – that force that makes things happen without any obvious cause.
Continue reading “Random and fortuitous (Words for talking about chance)”
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by Liz Walter
Today’s post is the second of a pair covering words and phrases connected with competitions and contests of all types (you can find the first post here). This post focuses on vocabulary associated with winning and losing.
Continue reading “Decisive victory or narrow defeat: talking about competitions (2)”
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Today’s post has a rather positive feel to it as I’m looking at the language we use to describe luck and feeling lucky.
Continue reading “Do I feel lucky? (Ways of talking about luck)”
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by Liz Walter
From the Olympic Games through to ‘biggest cabbage’ at the local gardening show, most of us take part in competitions of some sort or another. Today’s post looks at the language we use to talk about them.
Continue reading “Tournaments and contests: talking about competitions (1)”
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Regular readers of this blog often ask us for posts on English idioms used now in contemporary English. One way we make sure we provide up-to-date idioms is by looking at those used in current newspaper articles. The expressions included in this week’s post are taken from a range of national newspapers that were published on June 16, 2025.
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by Liz Walter
My colleague Kate Woodford recently wrote a post about the stock market, which included several synonyms for going up and going down. The context was of prices, values and amounts, but most of these words can be used very literally for objects as well – prices rise but so do hot-air balloons. This post continues the theme with a few more words for going up and down, some of which are used in rather specific contexts.
Continue reading “Ascending and descending: talking about going up or down”
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A little while back, my colleague, Liz Walter, published a post on phrases that contain the word ‘blood’. Today, I’m picking up the ‘parts of the body’ theme with a post on idioms with the word ‘bone’. There are a surprising number of them!
Continue reading “I feel it in my bones (Idioms with ‘bone’)”
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We all make mistakes. Often, they’re small and easily corrected, though sadly this is not always true. Today’s post takes a look at the different types of mistakes that we make, big and small, written and spoken.
Continue reading “Gaffes and blunders (Different types of mistakes)”