English language

Colourful Surnames

Niall O'Donnell 26 Comments

Black, White, Grey, Green, Brown, Gold/Golden. Niall, I hear you ask, why have you capitalised all those colours!? Surely you’re not going to tell us that there’s some obscure English rule that says that you have to use capital letters with colours, and we’ve all been doing it wrong all this time? God I’d love to, but no, those words are capitalised because, yes, they’re colours, but in this case I’m using them as surnames.

I’ve written before about surnames, and what they mean. Most of them have fairly mundane origins, describing people’s jobs or their birthplaces. This is because in the grand scheme of things, surnames are fairly new. Many of the earliest English surnames were attached to people to differentiate them from other people in the village with the same first name (e.g. that’s John Miller the miller, not John Taylor the tailor). If you think about a lot of common English surnames, it’s probably not too hard to imagine where they came from. But why is it that colours are so common as surnames?

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Boot or Trunk? Hood or Bonnet?

Niall O'Donnell 13 Comments

One of the strangest areas of difference between British and American English is that of cars. In many ways, the general differences between words in both main forms of English are small and superficial. Things like removing a U from a word like colour, or swapping an R and an E around at the end of a word. Other differences are based on old uses and forms of words, and are understandably caused by 200 years or so of drift. And there’s sports.

But cars are such a relatively new invention that it always seemed strange to me that American and British English would have such different words to refer to their different parts. Specifically why a boot in British English is a trunk in American English, and a bonnet is a hood.

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Learner Drivers at the Intersection of French and English

Niall O'Donnell 10 Comments

Would you surprised that learner is a very-commonly used English word in other languages? Well, not exactly the word learner itself, but the L-plate used on cars to indicate that the driver is a learner. I’d been driving in Belgium for a while, and had noticed that their L-plates are a blue background with a white L, as opposed to the Irish white with a red L. But I never stopped to consider that the L stood for Learner (the French translation would be apprenant or apprenti). Never, that is, until I saw a French learner driver…

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Perfect!

Niall O'Donnell 4 Comments

Yesterday, I looked at the present perfect simple tense, a tricky customer for people learning English. The progressive aspect can also of course be in the past and the future, and can be combined with the continuous (progressive) aspect. As with the present perfect simple, the perfect aspect always joins two different time periods together. The present perfect simple is the most common way you’ll use the perfect aspect, but let’s have a quick look at the other ways we use it:

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English Lessons for Experts: Present Perfect Simple

Niall O'Donnell 9 Comments

We’ve already looked at the three main tenses in English: the past, the present, and the future. Or two tenses, if you don’t consider the future a tense. But in addition to tense, there’s another element to referring to time in English, and that’s aspect. There are three different aspects in English, each of which can be combined with a tense (and sometimes another aspect), and they are: simple, continuous, and perfect.

I’ve already covered simple and continuous in writing about tenses, and they’re fairly straightforward (I go, or I’m going), but the perfect aspect is a little trickier. Before getting into the details, have a look at the following pairs of sentences:

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“How Does he Smell?” “Terrible!” or: Is it “Feel Bad” or “Feel Badly?”

Niall O'Donnell 7 Comments

Or should that be terribly? This is something that can be confusing for native speakers, and I’ve noticed recently more and more people getting into tangles with this area of language. Which ironically, I think, is due to people having more knowledge about language than before. First of all though, what aspect of language are we talking about here?

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Quick on the Draw!

Niall O'Donnell 10 Comments

The verb to draw is quite a useful one, isn’t it? There’s the obvious meaning of draw a picture, but consider how many other ways we use it:

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