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COLUMNS
Language Interference
'Show some leg'
English interference in Swedish
Book
Review
The Fight for English:
How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left
British
and American
culture
Entertainment and shopping in London
New
words of the month
A review if 2006 in twelve words
Your
questions answered
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In this section of the magazine, from time
to time, we'll be sharing with you questions which have been sent to us.
You may find that you've had the same queries yourself, or that your students
keep coming up with similar questions. But if you feel that you still
have a few more lexical questions that you'd like to get off your chest,
fill in this form and we'll get back
to you!
This month the answers are provided by Elizabeth
Potter, freelance lexicographer and author of the articles on 'Word
Formation' and 'Metaphor' in the Macmillan
Essential Dictionary.
Your questions
answered |
profit,
gain and benefit |
I was recently asked for
the difference in use between profit, gain and
benefit (excluding finance). I have asked many teachers
but no-one can give a clear answer. Help, please! |
These words are all very close in meaning,
so I'm not surprised that people have trouble distinguishing
between them.
Benefit is the most frequent and the
most general of these words. It can be both countable and
uncountable, and it means an advantage that you get from a
situation. It is used in many different patterns and constructions
(take a look in the Macmillan
English Dictionary (MED) to see the full range of
these):
Consider the potential benefits of
the deal.
The new sports facility will bring lasting benefit to
the community.
Not all competition is of benefit to the consumer.
He has had the benefit of the best education money
can buy.
Gain is very similar in meaning to
benefit: a gain is a benefit or an advantage.
Gain is countable and is neutral in register:
It is a policy that will bring significant
gains to all sections of the community.
Surely there could be no gain to him from the old lady's
death.
There may be a suggestion with gain
that you have made an effort to achieve something, whereas
a benefit can be undeserved. This is shown
in the expression 'no pain, no gain', which means that you
have to suffer in order to achieve things.
Profit is defined in MED as 'the advantage
you get from a situation'. It is uncountable (so you don't
talk about profits, except in the financial sense)
and is labelled as formal. It is much less frequent than the
other two words, and is rarely used in speech:
No profit lay in that line of thinking.
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is
or are? |
Should we say:
Cheese and milk are / is in the fridge.
Every boy and girl is / are clever.
Here come / comes Mr and Mrs Tan.
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Strictly speaking, it should be: Cheese
and milk are in the fridge and Here come
Mr and Mrs Tan because the subjects are plural. However,
people often use a singular verb with a plural subject in
speech, so it is quite possible to say Cheese and milk
is in the fridge and Here comes Mr and
Mrs Tan and it would not sound wrong to many people, though
some might object (even though they might in fact say such
things themselves without realising).
I wouldn't say either Every boy and girl
is clever or Every boy and girl are clever
because both sound completely unnatural. But with a different
verb Every boy and girl wants to be popular
it becomes clear that the verb should be in the singular,
even though the subject is plural. This is just an oddity
of the language. If you look at the entry for every
in MED it says:
A noun subject that follows every is
used with a singular verb.
Each behaves in a very similar way.
One way of remembering this is to think of the famous lines
from Gilbert
and Sullivan's operetta Iolanthe:
That every boy and every gal
That's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative. |
thrown
in |
Could you possibly help
me with the following expression found in an activity: …
you don't get one thrown in with the room, don't worry. Be
happy. I would appreciate if you could tell me what get
one thrown in with the room means and if it is a fixed
expression, collocation or idiomatic expression. |
It would be useful to know what one
refers to, but the meaning of the expression is clear without
it. If something is thrown in, it is included in something
you are paying for at no extra cost. Here is the example from
the Macmillan
English Dictionary:
Buy a computer now and get a free printer
thrown in!
This means that the shop is so eager to sell
you a computer that it will give you a printer at no extra
cost, in order to encourage you to go there rather than to
another shop. (Whether you can ever really get anything for
nothing is a different question, and not a linguistic one!)
And here's another about children's parties:
Swimming, football, party games, bouncy
castling or rollerblading to disco music all
are on offer at the Oasis Leisure Centre in Swindon. A meal,
a toy and a fizzy drink is thrown in with every booking.
In this case you pay for the activity and
the food, toy and drink are free.
MED classifies this as a phrasal verb, because
it consists of a verb (throw) plus a particle (in)
and has a meaning beyond that of its constituent parts (that
is, it doesn't mean the same as throw in in the sentence
'I threw a stone in the water'.) To this extent
it is idiomatic, like all phrasal verbs.
To read more questions and
answers, go to the Index
page. |
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