MED Magazine - Your questions answered

MED Magazine - Issue 40 - July 2006

Your questions answered

expressions with nose

I found there are a number of phrases with the word nose in English. I just wonder why there are so many phrases with it.

Like many languages, English has a lot of expressions relating to body parts. Some experts on metaphor say that this is because we all have a body, so we are naturally inclined to express ourselves in terms of our physical experiences, and our sense organs in particular. The entry for nose in the Macmillan English Dictionary (MED) lists 17 idiomatic expressions. This is a similar number to the entry for ear (15) and a lot more than for tooth, mouth or lip (5 each). Chin and cheek meanwhile have a mere two each. However, the number of expressions at nose and ear is dwarfed by those for other body parts: eye and head have a massive 41 and 40 expressions respectively. This makes sense when you think that sight is generally regarded as the primary sense, while the head is where the brain and sense organs are located.

Obviously MED can only record the most frequent expressions for words like nose; there are very many others. You might like to think about body part expressions in other languages you know, and how they compare to those of English.

looking-glass scenario

Could you help me with this expression taken from an issue of Time magazine: looking-glass scenario?

In the famous children's book Through the Looking-Glass (1871) Lewis Carroll described the adventures of Alice when she went through the drawing-room mirror and into the world beyond the looking-glass (an old-fashioned word for a mirror). As in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, everything in this parallel world is strange and contradictory, and Alice finds herself participating in a living game of chess. Like Alice In Wonderland looking-glass has come to be used to describe situations in which everything seems to be the opposite of what is normal or what you would expect. So a looking-glass scenario would be a situation that seemed to defy logic and the usual way of doing things.

I found a few examples of this phrase on the Internet. One, from the Time article you cite, describes a world in which people can choose between watching a new movie in the cinema, on their home movie systems, or even on their computer. The 'unreal' element here is that movie companies, who you would expect to try to defend cinema viewing against the advance of new media, are actually giving in and giving people what they want.

To correct or not to correct?

More and more people these days seem to say I was stood instead of I was standing. Should I correct my students when they speak like this? There are other similar problems, for example, there's some problems vs there are some problems.

This is a tricky one. I think it all comes down to two things: what bothers someone personally and what is appropriate in different contexts.

A lot of native speakers of English quite naturally say I was stood and There's some problems. Here are a couple of examples from the corpus that was used when writing the Macmillan English Dictionary:

The last time I was stood up on a platform and did this was in front of a congress in Dieppe.
I understand there's some problems with residents in Orange County and Los Angeles.

The operative word here, I think, is say. Some people would object to these uses as being incorrect in all circumstances, but I think that's unreasonable. It's actually quite tricky to say There are some problems (try it) while I was stood sounds friendly and informal, which is one reason people use it. Neither of the citations above is from a particularly informal situation: the speaker of the first quote is actually giving a speech at a conference, while the second is the White House spokesman.

The problem is that people often expect students to speak more correctly than native speakers, and might even correct them if they say I was stood, on the assumption that they don't know it's 'wrong'. My inclination would be to tell your students that these are informal uses and so best avoided in writing, but OK in speech, provided they don't mind the risk of being corrected.