Seriously, please. After I wrote about eau de Cologne recently, a few of you referred to eau de toilette in the comments, and it’s clear similarity to the English word toilet (and in fact, eau de toilette could be directly translated as toilet water).
Toilet is a surprisingly interesting word. On the surface of course it just refers to the object that stands in your bathroom, but how and when people use it (the word, not the actual toilet) varies quite a bit around the world.
You may have thought yesterday, when reading about the word almost, that there are a few other similarly-constructed words in English. There’s already, alright, and altogether, all of which are really just all + ready/right/together. And often you can replace the single word with all + together etc. Not always though…
While searching for a bathroom in a hospital in Liège this morning (I’m OK, I was donating blood, and I’m writing this on Friday afternoon, so I’m not in Cologne yet), I began to become slightly concerned, as one was hard to find, and I really needed to go. I began to think I’d have to ask someone for directions, and as I do when I know in advance what I’ll need to say in a certain situation, I quickly went through what I’d say in French:
I’ll be driving to Cologne in the morning, so I may not get much writing done over the weekend.
Cologne of course, is a city in western Germany.
Cologne though, as in cologne with a lower-case C when it’s not at the start of a sentence, is something a man sprays on himself to smell nice.
The reason we use the name for both is pretty straightforward.
Yesterday, Donald Trump recognised (or recognized, if you prefer) Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Don’t worry, I’m not going to get political this time. There’s nothing I can add to the numerous international condemnations of this move anyway. Once I’d finished shaking my head and sighing with resignation, I began to think about how apparently strange it is to use the verb to recognise in this way.
While writing yesterday, I was thinking about my tendency to think about language in general as I’m going about my daily life. Obviously this is something I do more often since beginning to work in the English-language teaching industry, but I realised that I’ve actually been doing it for a long time: just not in the same way.
You? Why for you, both are correct!
😉
Seriously though, are both of these correct? Do they have the same meaning?
English-Language Thoughts 