I was happy to hear from Guido, a teacher working in Seville. He said that he liked the idea of using images of book covers from Amazon to create classroom activities. He made this YouTube clip for his students:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hObhPOiT8U

.
So what are the missing words?

…..   …………… that I had duck feet
…..   …………… I could hold your […]

[Read more →]

This is the title of a guest posting that I have written for the Macmillan Dictionary blog (link given below). In the posting, I look at the theory behind a YouTube clip that I made a few months ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5XNR419aXE

.
You can read the posting here.

[Read more →]

Two cash machines saying the same thing in different ways:

[Top up as a verb]

[Top up as a noun]
This is what language in use is all about - having multiple ways of saying what you want to express.

Can you lend me your pen?
Can I borrow your pen?

Not last night but the night before
The night before […]

[Read more →]

Wordcount is a beautiful squeaky-clean representation of the 86,800 most frequent words in English (data is taken from the British National Corpus).

This is the best representation of a word list I have ever seen. As you can see, the word list is presented as a long horizontal chain. The more common a word in the […]

[Read more →]

I saw some good examples of noun-noun compounds recently in the London Underground on these advertisements for a fitness club:

According to Wikipedia, “Bingo wings is a slang term used to describe the build-up of fat and/or extra skin that hangs from the underside of the upper arms. It occurs most frequently in elderly ladies and […]

[Read more →]

“We are currently witnessing the worst credit crunch the world has ever seen since the term was invented last year.”
I heard someone saying that on the radio a couple of weeks ago and it made me laugh. It also made we wonder when the term really did come into existence.
I can’t find anything online about […]

[Read more →]