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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)”
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by Liz Walter
Here in the UK we are well into our spring season, which made me think about the words and phrases we use to describe the plants that are now growing or coming back to life after the long winter. Continue reading “Shoots, blooms and blossom: talking about plants”
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by Liz Walter
We often need to keep our minds fixed on the things we are doing, and this post looks at ways of talking about this. Regular readers know that I like to focus on collocations, or words that often go together, and that will certainly be the case for this topic. Continue reading “Paying attention and listening intently: talking about concentration”
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In my last post, I looked at a range of collocations for the words ‘famous’ and ‘fame’. This week, I’m continuing the ‘fame’ theme but considering synonyms (and near-synonyms) for the adjective ‘famous’. As ever, I’m looking at the precise differences in meaning and use between them. Continue reading “Renowned and celebrated (Words meaning ‘famous’)”
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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’)”
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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 is scabby:
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!
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by Liz Walter
For most of us, stress is unfortunately a part of modern life. Today’s post is about words and phrases we use to talk about the experience of stress and our attempts to reduce it. Continue reading “Everything’s getting on top of me: talking about stress”
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by Liz Walter
Back in 2016, my colleague Kate Woodford wrote a pair of posts on ways of describing good and bad things. However, sometimes things aren’t particularly good or bad, but somewhere in between. This post covers a selection of words and phrases you can use in these cases. Continue reading “It’ll have to do: talking about things that aren’t very good or very bad”
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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:
Can we all, please, make an effort to keep the kitchen a bit cleaner? Continue reading “Going the extra mile and elbow grease (Idioms for making an effort)”
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by Liz Walter
In my last post, I wrote about verbs that describe circular movements. I’m staying with the theme of movement today and looking at shaking movements and movements from side to side. Continue reading “Juddering, quivering and wobbling: more verbs to describe movement”