Mar 27, 2018 Chunks, Word of the day Word of the day: less The other day, just as I was slowly waking up and making my first cup of coffee, I heard a discussion on the radio about the whether or not you can say “less than one in five people”. It seemed that several listeners had said that this was wrong and were insisting that less should […]
Mar 14, 2018 Chunks, Word of the day Word of the day: social mobility Social mobility is the idea that over their lifetimes or across generations, people from lower-class backgrounds can move to a higher social class. An example of this would be my father, who grew up in relative poverty in Liverpool before the war. He was the son of a factory worker, but he then won a […]
Mar 9, 2018 Chunks, Word of the day Word of the day: cowboy If, like many foreign students, the main image that comes into your head when you think of cowboys involves men in big hats and long boots, riding horses and heading off into the sunset somewhere in America, then you may be wondering what on earth the photo above has to do with cowboys. You’d probably […]
Feb 26, 2018 Chunks, Word of the day Word of the day: mate I witnessed a rather entertaining scene yesterday afternoon outside a tube station in north London. The wallet of a middle-aged man somehow managed to drop out of his back pocket as he was leaving the station, and a younger – foreign – man saw this, picked it up and tried to get the attention of […]
Feb 23, 2018 Chunks, Word of the day Word of the day: drone Up until a few years ago, the word drone was most commonly used as a verb. If someone droned on and on, they talked about something in a boring way for a long time, so you might get stuck next to someone at a party who spent the whole evening droning on about work . […]
