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 Your
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Dictionary of Contemporary Slang
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MED
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English accents and dialects
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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 |
| 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.
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| looking-glass
scenario |
|
Could you help me with this
expression taken from an issue of Time magazine: looking-glass
scenario?
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| 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.
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| 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.
To read more questions and answers, go to the
Index page.
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