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Today’s post has a very positive feel to it as I’m looking at the language around responding to opportunities.
Starting with a useful collocation, we say that we take an opportunity, meaning that we use a chance to do something.
Continue reading “Making the most of it (How we talk about using opportunities)”
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by Liz Walter
In my last post on words for being clumsy, I included the phrase all fingers and thumbs. This made me think about how many phrases we have that contain the word ‘finger’. This post covers some of the most common and useful ones.
Continue reading “A finger in every pie: phrases with the word ‘finger’”
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by Liz Walter
It is common to see confusion between the words ‘worse’ and ‘worst’, so in today’s post, I am going to explain the difference and also talk about some useful phrases which contain these words. Continue reading “Worse than or worst of all? How to use the words ‘worse’ and ‘worst’”
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This week, in the second of two ‘Talking about differences’ posts, I’m looking at idioms and other phrases that are used for saying that things or people are different. Continue reading “Apples and oranges (Talking about differences, Part 2)”
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by Liz Walter
The other day, I read a report about someone whose crimes were hidden in plain sight. In other words, they should have been easy to spot, but in fact were so obvious that nobody noticed them. We can also say that someone hides (or hides something) in plain sight:
Clues to his feelings were hidden in plain sight in his poems.
The hijackers hid in plain sight, taking flying lessons at private schools. Continue reading “Hidden in plain sight: words and phrases connected with hiding”
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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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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’)”
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by Liz Walter
We all make judgments every day about what to believe and what not to believe, so it’s not surprising that there are several nice phrases to express this process.
If you have something on good authority, you have been given information about it by someone you trust:
I have it on good authority that she’s considering selling the property. Continue reading “I feel it in my bones: phrases connected with believing or disbelieving”
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by Liz Walter
My last post looked at ways of responding to introductions and introducing other people. Today’s post gives some ideas about how to take the conversation further. We call this kind of chatting small talk but with luck it can lead to deeper and more interesting conversations! Continue reading “Have you come far? Chatting to someone you don’t know (2)”