MED Magazine - Issue 43 - October 2006
Your questions answered |
-ness |
I want to know if the word
initiativeness is an acceptable word to be used in sentences
such as: As a Customer Service Executive you are being measured
through your initiativeness in handling customer complaints.
Is it correct to use this word? I couldn't find it in the dictionary. |
Not only is this word not in the dictionary,
there is not a single instance of it on all the millions of
websites searched by Google. '-ness' is often added to adjectives
to form nouns meaning a state or a quality, for example politeness
the quality of being polite; happiness
the state of being happy. However, initiative is a
noun, not an adjective, so in this case the suffix is redundant:
initiative already means "the quality of being
able to decide independently what to do and when to do it".
If you wanted to make the sentence even more
explicit than it already is, you could say "… your use
of initiative/your ability to use your initiative in …".
|
hear
vs listen |
Why can one say I
heard about that but not I listened about that?
|
Like many frequent words, both listen
and hear have more than one meaning. While their 'core'
meanings relating to perceiving with your ears are similar
and often confuse learners, I don't think those are the meanings
being used here. Hear has several different meanings
and the one that is being used when we say "I heard
about that" is the one that means something like
learn. The Macmillan English Dictionary defines it
as "to receive information about something". When
you use this meaning of hear you are not necessarily
referring to the use of your ears at all you could
hear about something via email or in a letter or by
reading a newspaper. Listen, on the other hand, means
"to pay attention to a sound or to try to hear a sound"
it refers to a physical sensory act rather than to
receiving information.
Hear plus about is a very significant
combination; you could almost treat it as a single unit of
meaning. I was going to say that listen about does
not occur as a unit, but in fact it does, although it is not
that frequent and I was not familiar with it. It seems to
mean that someone pays attention to someone or something (or
often that they don't), or sometimes just the same as listen
to. I found these examples using Google:
They are not even prepared to listen
about other religions.
He mostly seems to want to sing about heroin and gangstas,
and I don't really want to listen about heroin and
gangstas.
You could watch and listen about hockey until your
brain overloads.
|
pronouncing
fractions |
I read a lot of books
about pronouncing fractions. They are very different. Can
you tell me the clear way to pronounce them?
|
The reason you are finding different ways
of pronouncing fractions is because there are different
ways of pronouncing them, which are equally correct. The basic
rule is that you use the ordinal form of the number (the one
that usually ends in 'th', like fifth and ninth)
for the bottom number and the cardinal form (for example three
or four) for the top, and you pluralise the ordinal
number:
3/10 |
three tenths |
4/5 |
four fifths |
2/3 |
two thirds |
11/26 |
eleven twenty-sixths |
19/100 |
nineteen hundredths |
3/1000 |
three thousandths |
When the top number is 1 you can use
a or one:
1/5 |
a fifth or one fifth |
1/10 |
a tenth or one tenth |
1/3 |
a third or one third |
When the bottom number is 2, you use
half (not second):
When the bottom number is 4, you can
use either fourth or quarter. Fourth
tends to be more common in American English and quarter
in British English, but both are used in both:
1/4 |
a quarter or one quarter or
a fourth or one fourth |
3/4 |
three quarters or three fourths |
To read more questions and answers, go to the
Index page. |
|
Copyright © 2006 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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