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FEATURE
Wildly
irregular or no longer insuperable?
Approaches to teaching and
learning phrasal verbs
COLUMNS
Language
interference
False friends between
Spanish and English
Focus
on Phrasal Verbs:
Introduction
How new phrasal verbs develop
New
word of the month
From metrosexual to metrosessuale:
the global influence of English in
the creation of neologisms
 Corpora
tips
Googling for idiomatic language
Search engines as corpora tools
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Corpora
tips
by Mairi
MacDonald
>Main article
Activity 2
Answers
According to Google,
dead as a doornail (with over 150,000 results) is the most common
of the three, followed by dead as a dodo (with around 43,000 results)
and dead as a duck (with over 600 results).
be the cat’s whiskers
(British English)
be the cat’s miaow (American English)/meow (British English)
be the cat’s pajamas (American English)/pyjamas (British
English)
To reach the expected
or necessary standard.
Websites that are devoted to idioms.
This suggests that the phrase is not used very often in day-to-day language.
It is usually found in negative sentences.
See the activity
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