Onomatopoeia is a strange thing. Officially, it's the use of words that supposedly sound like the sounds they refer to. If we only speak one language, we hardly ever even notice such words as buzz or thud, and if we…
Phrase of the day: one for the road
As you may have noticed from our last post, we ran our first-ever Lexical Lab summer school in London this summer. As well as designing, running and teaching on the courses, we also put together a full social and cultural…
Phrase of the day: I think not
One of the courses we ran this July as part of our very first Lexical Lab summer school was ADVANCED LANGUAGE AND CULTURE, which lasted two weeks and which explored everything from the class system to education to Brexit to…
Phrase of the day: rule of thumb
My mother turned 70 last month and to celebrate we took her to Majorca for a week-long break. We rented a villa in Puerto Pollensa up on the north coast. It was just about large enough for my mum and…
Phrase of the day: go pear-shaped
Last night I was at our local pub quiz. For anyone who hasn’t experienced this, basically it’s an excuse for people to get together and drink, but at the same time it allows ourselves to feel that we are not…
Phrase of the day: a big If
We use the phrase that’s / it’s a big if to show that we realise that what we are about to say – or what someone has just been speculating about – is really very unlikely indeed to actually happen.…
Phrase of the day: Time is of the essence
Over recent weeks, we've been taking a fair few bookings for what will be our first ever London summer school. It's all very exciting, even if it does involve far more red tape than we'd initially anticipated. In order to…
Phrase of the day: two-fingered salute
At some point during most courses we run, we end up taking whichever students are up for it to the pub. It's a grand British tradition and the pub is basically where we go to let our hair down, relax…
Phrase of the day: deeply divided
Last Sunday, Turkey went to the polls to vote on whether to approve 18 proposed amendments to the Turkish constitution that had been put forward by the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). If implemented,…
Phrase of the day: the mother of all
Last week, the US military dropped the largest conventional (i.e. non-nuclear) bomb it has ever used in combat on an area in eastern Afghanistan that contained a complex of tunnels and bunkers used by militants connected to Daesh, the group…