language

A Robot? Doesn’t Look Like Anything to Me…

Niall O'Donnell 9 Comments

Did you watch Westworld? Enjoy all the twists, and the accompanying guesswork about who might secretly be a…. host? I wanted to write robot there, but a few episodes into the series I noticed that none of the characters seemed to have used the word robot, and I guessed that over the course of the season none of them would (I wasn’t paying very close attention to see if anyone did or not, but I don’t recall noticing the word). Which might seem a little odd, because it’s a series all about robots. Cowboy robots. Most of the characters we see are robots. And they meet the criteria according to the two definitions in the OED:

  • A machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer
  • (especially in science fiction) a machine resembling a human being and able to replicate certain human movements and functions automatically

But they’re always referred to as hosts. But then, that doesn’t really seem that odd. Because it’s prestige television, and robot isn’t really a prestige word, is it? And I don’t mean to be critical of the producers’ attitude, because I understand their aversion to the word. Because robot just sounds a bit silly, doesn’t it?

It shouldn’t, because it’s a perfectly legitimate word that describes real-life machines that make a lot of our favourite products. But when you hear the word robot, you probably don’t picture this: Continue reading →

Practice Makes Perfect. Or is that “Practise…”

Niall O'Donnell 16 Comments

This post is something of a companion piece to yesterday’s.

Up until early February 2008, I never gave much thought to the spelling of the word practice. Or practise, for that matter. What happened then, in the last depths of winter, to change that?

I wrote my lesson plan for my first teaching practice on my teacher-training course, that’s what happened. Somewhere within that incredibly detailed plan, I wrote something along the lines of Students practice using the target language. Continue reading →

Daily Prompt: Protest

Niall O'Donnell 6 Comments

via Daily Prompt: Protest

What’s the difference between the following words in bold:

I’d like to protest about my treatment!

I’m going to a protest about the treatment of refugees tomorrow.

If you’re linguistically minded, or simply very smart, you may have answered that even though they look identical, the first one is a verb, and the second a noun. You can tell from the context of the sentences. But if you were listening to someone recite those sentences, there’d be another clue to help you know the difference. Think about how you’d say both, or say them both out loud, if it’s not too embarrassing, and see if you can figure out the clue.

If you’re still not sure of the difference, here’s a visual aid: Continue reading →

Discover Challenge: Tough Questions

Niall O'Donnell 8 Comments

via Discover Challenge: Tough Questions

Do you think you have to deal with tough questions sometimes? Well count yourself lucky, if you’re a native English speaker, as if you’re an English learner, almost all questions are tough questions. Most of us don’t realise how easy we have it, never having to learn how to form questions, instead picking it up naturally. Even the most commonplace questions are surprisingly complex in their structure. For example: Continue reading →

Drink

Niall O'Donnell 9 Comments

Even if grammatically there’s only a small difference in aspect, in terms of meaning, there’s an entire world of difference between:

Are you drinking?

and

Do you drink?

As I’ve pondered on before, we actually don’t really use the verbs to eat or to drink very often, or at least not as often as how we each teach them would lead a learner to expect. To have tends to cover any situation where we could use either. But I was just thinking today how particularly loaded the word (to) drink can be, with its meaning changing a lot depending on the context or the tense we use. Have a look at these examples: Continue reading →

Cultural Cringe

Niall O'Donnell 27 Comments

Have you ever heard one of your compatriots say something and thought to yourself, embarrassed, Oh my God, that’s so Irish/American/Indian/English etc? If so, you may be suffering from cultural cringe.

Oxford English Dictionary: The view that one’s own national culture is inferior to the cultures of other countries

Coined by Australian writer A.A Phillips in the 1950s, the term is often discussed in reference to (post)colonial societies, to demonstrate how a culture can internalise its colonisers’ view of it as inferior. Cultural cringe can often manifest itself as a reaction against the language or dialect of one’s culture. A common example would be someone who hates to hear certain colloquial terms from their region. Have you ever changed your accent, to avoid it’s “regional” sound? Made sure to pronounce your g’s, when perhaps your parents didn’t? Sometimes it’s a pragmatic decision to fit in in a new environment, sometimes it’s an unconscious, gradual process, but sometimes it’s because you don’t want people to know where you’re from, or at least to think you’re a stereotypical representative of there. Continue reading →

Literally Unbelievable

Niall O'Donnell

Is there a word as commonly misused as literally? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as:

In a literal manner or sense; exactly:

‘the driver took it literally when asked to go straight over the roundabout’
‘tiramisu, literally translated ‘pull-me-up’’
The opposite of literally is figuratively. We’d mostly use this word if there were a chance that something we said could be taken literally, or if we wanted to refer to both figurative and literal uses of the same phrase. For example:
The mysterious blackout left people both literally and figuratively in the dark.
Yet if the meanings of these two words are so diametrically opposed, why would people make apparently obvious mistakes with them? Here are some of the most egregious mistakes I’ve come across:

Continue reading →