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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)”
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by Liz Walter
It is very common to use prepositions and preposition-based phrases to talk about where a place is in relation to where you are yourself. This could be within a country, a region or a city. There are some subtle differences in the way speakers of British and American English do this. In this post, I’ll discuss some of the most common ones.
Continue reading “Up north and down south: prepositions for expressing directions”
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‘Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.’ So said Albert Einstein. It may be comforting to remember this quote when an action of yours produces unwanted results. Of course, no one likes making mistakes, but mistakes are part of life. That’s why we have so many ways of talking about them. This post and my next are dedicated to this subject.
Continue reading “Rookie mistakes and schoolboy errors (Talking about mistakes)”
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by Liz Walter
When my dear Granny had completed a task to her satisfaction, she used to exclaim, ‘That’s a good job jobbed!’ Although she wasn’t the only person to use this phrase, it’s pretty rare, so this post will cover some much more common ways of talking about doing things successfully.
Continue reading “Killing two birds with one stone: talking about achievements”
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A few years ago on this blog, we published a post on words that mean ‘funny’. It recently occurred to me that we should also look at the opposite, so today’s post looks at the language we use to describe things or people that are serious – sometimes too serious.
Continue reading “It’s no laughing matter! (Words that mean ‘serious’)”