Question from Cathy in Canada:

Can we say I arrive to work at 9 o’clock or do we need to use “at”? Also can we say I was late to class or do we need to use “in”? Thank you.

Answer:

Hi Cathy, thanks for your question. The worst thing about prepositions is that there are no nice simple rules to let you know how to use them with certain words. Your question, Cathy, demonstrates this. In most cases you just have to learn the prepositions that go with certain words. Let’s look at your two verbs : to arrive and to be late.

‘Arrive‘ can be followed by several prepositions depending on what is following, look at these:

* I arrived for work in the morning. (arrive + for where ‘work’ is a task or job to undertake)

* I arrived at work in the morning. (arrive + at where ‘work’ is a place)

* I arrived in time to see her. (arrive + in time where there is a temporal aspect)

So, in terms of your first question, I would say that you can use ‘for‘ or ‘at‘ depending on what sense you want to give ‘work’ (a place or a task).

Your second question with ‘to be late‘ is a bit different as I don’t think either of your options is correct.

* I was late for class.

is the correct usage … late for something.

Hope that’s helped!

Question from Salim in Lebanon:

Recently I stopped on the word vocabulary to find that it can be countable..so can you offer me the way we can use vocabularies in a sentence..in what sense can it be correct..thanks

Answer:

Hi Salim, this is a quick question to answer for you. The word ‘vocabulary‘ can of course be singular as in ‘the English vocabulary‘, that is all of the words in the English language, or ‘my English vocabulary ‘, all of the English words that I know, but, as you point out, it can also be plural.

Think about all of the languages in the world – each one has its own vocabulary. So there is a Chinese vocabulary, and an Arabic vocabulary, a Russian vocabulary – each one is very different, and we can say, ‘ the Chinese, Arabic and Russian vocabularies contain a large number of items’.

You can also have sub-sets of word groups in a language, such as English, where we talk about a ‘vocabulary’, for example the ‘vocabulary of marketing’ or the ‘vocabulary of banking’ – we could group these together under ‘business vocabulary’ and talk about the different business ‘vocabularies‘.

Hope that has helped.

Question from Dawood in Pakistan

What’s the difference between ‘read’ and ’study’?

 

Answer

Hello Dawood. There may sometimes be a confusion between ‘read’ and ’study’, especially when the context is academic, but really these two verbs have quite different meanings.

Let’s look at ‘study‘ first. I think that the first thing to say is that the verb ‘to study’ does not necessarily imply that any reading is done. You can study the night sky, or study an insect’s behaviour or geological formation – none of these require that you ‘read’ anything. What they do require is that you:

* Apply your mind purposefully to the acquisition of knowledge or understanding of (a subject).

That is one of the definitions of ‘to study’ by the way. Now, of course, you can apply your mind purposefully to aquiring knowledge while you are reading and in that case you would be studying and reading at the same time and the two would be very closely related. Reading is:

* To examine and grasp the meaning of printed or written characters, as of words or music.

However, if you are reading a comic for fun we wouldn’t say that you were ‘studying the comic ‘- here reading is a recreational activity and you are not really trying to aquire knowledge.

In the case of the comic I would say:

* I am reading a comic.

You can see that ‘to read’ then does not necessarily imply study. However, if I am studying for an examination or a course and someone asks me what I am doing while I am reading a book on English grammar I could say:

* I’m reading about English grammar.

* I’m studying English grammar.

In that case, there is an overlap in meaning or usage between ‘read’ and ’study’.

I’ve simplified the meanings here so that the difference is perhaps easier to understand but ’study’ and ‘read’ have a range of meanings, some overlapping, and if you want to find out more about these two verbs I am including here some definitions from answers.com.

READ

v., read reading, reads.

v.tr.

* To examine and grasp the meaning of (written or printed characters, words, or sentences).

* To utter or render aloud (written or printed material): read poems to the students.

* To have the ability to examine and grasp the meaning of (written or printed material in a given language or notation): reads Chinese; reads music.

*

* To examine and grasp the meaning of (language in a form other than written or printed characters, words, or sentences): reading Braille; reading sign language.

* To examine and grasp the meaning of (a graphic representation): reading a map.

*

* To discern and interpret the nature or significance of through close examination or sensitive observation: The tracker read the trail for signs of game.

* To discern or anticipate through examination or observation; descry: I can read abandonment in a broken door or shattered window (William H. Gass).

* To determine the intent or mood of: can read your mind like a book; a hard person to read.

*

* To attribute a certain interpretation or meaning to: read her words differently than I did.

* To consider (something written or printed) as having a particular meaning or significance: read the novel as a parable.

* To foretell or predict (the future).

* To receive or comprehend (a radio message, for example): I read you loud and clear.

* To study or make a study of: read history as an undergraduate.

* To learn or get knowledge of from something written or printed: read that interest rates would continue to rise.

* To proofread.

* To have or use as a preferred reading in a particular ...

Possessive Apostrophe

One of the most asked questions that we get at english4today.com is about the placement of the apostrophe for possessives. This is an answer for Pedro, who has asked about the possessive apostrophe, and for  Trish Upham from Australia who writes:

I am a Virtual Assistant working with lawyers and regularly come across the problem of multiple possessives in legal documents. For instance, when a group of people is buying a company, none of us can agree on the correct way to type something like “Smith, Dunn, & Bradstreet’s ownership”. Or should it be “Smith’s, Dunn’s, and Bradstreet’s”???

I would REALLY appreciate some expert opinion on this.

Thanks in anticipation!

Starting with your question first, Trish, the rule is that

* For joint ownership, show possession only on the last noun.

So your second example,’Smith, Dunn, & Bradstreet’s ownership’, is correct. As is,

There is always a great atmosphere at Joan and Max’s parties.

* For individual possession, show possession on all of the nouns.

Maire’s, Pierre’s and Hubert’s cars were all burnt during the recent riots in Paris.

Smith’s, Dunn’s and Bradstreet’s lives may not have been wildy exciting.

Some other rules for the possesive apostrophe are:

* For singular and plural nouns that do not end in -s, form the possessive by

adding -‘s. The women’s shelter, The dog’s bone.

* For singular nouns that end in -s, (whether pronounced or unpronounced), form the possessive by adding -‘s. Anthony Hughes’s blog, The class’s teacher.

* For plural nouns that end in –s, form the possessive by adding only an apostrophe.

The books’ covers were all damaged. The queens’ powers were eroded over the centuries.

* For compound nouns, show possession at the end of the compound.

The Queen Mary’s last cruise was to New York. The Republic of Congo’s government is not very stable.

* We do not use the possessive apostrophe with possessive pronouns (hers,

theirs, yours, whose, and its).

Hope that has helped Trish. What is a ‘virtual assistant’ … it sounds like one of those annoying little software beings Microsoft pops up in their programs all the time. If you let me know what it is I’ll put it up here so that we can settle a dispute now raging in our office! I keep telling them that those Microsoft animated bugs would not be able to email us…

Question from English4Today member Ellen in China:

 Apart from the “cue” word, ‘fall’, which comes before asleep, can you kindly tell me when to use asleep and when to use sleep?

Hello Ellen. Thanks for your question. Well, the most important difference between ‘sleep’ and ‘asleep’ grammatically is that ‘sleep’ is either a verb or a noun while ‘asleep’ is either an adverb or an adjective. What this means, in terms of how we use them is that different grammatical rules are going to apply depending on whether we are using a noun, verb, adjective or adverb.

Let’s look at ‘sleep’ as a noun first:

* Did you have a good sleep?

* Her sleep was troubled by nightmares.

* The Big Sleep

‘The Big Sleep‘ was, of course, the title of a Raymond Chandler novel and the classic movie adaption of it starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

That’s fairly easy to see, I think.

Now let’s look at ‘to sleep’ the verb:

* She slept until late afternoon.

* May has not been sleeping well.

* Is Dimitri sleeping? I don’t want to wake him.

I think that too is pretty clear as the use of the irregular verb ‘to sleep’ in tenses is very standard – other than the fact that it is an irregular verb (sleep, slept, slept).

So, how about ‘asleep’? Here are example of asleep used as an adjective or an adverb:

Asleep =  adverb

* Georgia fell asleep as soon as she went to bed.

* Paddy and Molly fell asleep on the train and missed their station.

You’ll see ‘asleep’ as an adverb most commonly with the verb ‘to fall’  and as an adjective with the verb ‘to be’ – and as you say, Ellen, these are cue words that you can use to recognize the adverbial or adjectival use of ‘asleep’. If I re-write the above sentences using ‘to sleep’ they would look like this:

* Georgia slept as soon as she went to bed.

* Paddy and Molly slept on the train and missed their station.

Notice that when we use ‘to fall’ + ‘asleep’ there is always a sense of the action happening suddenly which we can’t get just by using the verb ‘to sleep’ by itself.

Now let’s look at ‘asleep’ as an adjective:

Asleep = adjective

* My foot is asleep (meaning I cannot feel it).

* The dog is asleep – I wouldn’t wake him if I were you!

* Dax was asleep when you called

Note: it is not possible to use ‘to sleep’ in the passive form.

Hope that has cleared that up a little Ellen and that my explanation has put you to sleep!

Question from Rick in the USA

Why do we say “I did not meet him” rather than “I did not met him”, since this is the past tense?

 

Answer

Hi Rick. I’m going to answer this one although the answer is explained in the English4Today Online Grammar under the section dealing with forming the negative.

Let’s do a quick review of how the negative is formed in English. First we’ll take your sentence in the affirmative:

* I met him.

That’s fine… we have the verb in the Simple Past (don’t forget that ‘meet’ is an irregular verb and the past form is ‘met’). Now let’s make it negative. To make the sentence negative we have to use:

SUBJECT + DID + NOT + INFINITIVE OR BASE FORM OF THE VERB WITHOUT ‘TO’

I DID NOT MEET HIM.

What you need to remember here is that the auxiliary verb ‘DO’ is the one that carries the tense – that is, if we are using the Simple Past, as in the original sentence, then DO becomes DID. But the main verb ‘MEET’ stays in the infinitive – that is in its base form without ‘to’ – and is not put into the Simple Past.

Try making this one negative:

* She went to Rome last month.

OK … you should have written:

* She DID NOT GO (or ‘didn’t go’) to Rome last month.

If you’re still not sure, have a look through the English4Today Online English Grammar section on forming the negative.

Question from Teddy in the USA:

What is the difference between “may” or “might”? e.g.,

* I might have made a mistake or

* I may have made a mistake.

Thanks.

Answer

Hi Teddy and thanks for the question!

Using ‘may’ or ‘might’ can be a little confusing for an English learner – especially if you look too hard to find any difference in usage between the two!

‘May’ and ‘might’ are almost always interchangeable – that is, you can convey exactly the same meaning using either one. Both express a possibility of some action taking place. For example:

* It may rain this afternoon.

* It might rain this afternoon.

* He may miss the train if he doesn’t hurry.

* He might miss the train if he doesn’t hurry.

Most grammar will tell you that ‘might’ suggests a somewhat lower probability or possibility than ‘may‘ but this is a really fine distinction and you won’t be making any grammatical errors nor confusing your meaning if you use either one.

Now, when you are using ‘might‘ as the past tense of the auxiliary ‘may‘ then you stick with ‘might’ in the sentence:

* He might have caught his train if he had left work on time.

Don’t forget that ‘may‘ can also be used in interrogative sentences when you are asking permission to do something. It is a common ‘polite’ form. For example:

* May I use your telephone?

* May I smoke?

When used for asking permission we use ‘may‘ and not ‘might’. However, just to confuse it a little, it is more and more common to use ‘can‘ when asking permission although can doesn’t, in my opinion, yet carry the same sense of polite request that using ‘may’ does :

* Can I use your telephone, please?

* Can I smoke?

 It’s not that unusual in fiction for dramatic events in an author’s life to enter into the work of fiction that they are creating. It’s perhaps a lot less common when that real life drama is happening at the same time that the work is being written and that the tragic outcome for the author, in this case execution in a Nazi death camp, leads both to a sudden interruption in the narrative and to the manuscript only being discovered and published sixty four years after the author’s death. That alone is perhaps enough to make Irene Némirovsky’s book, Suite Française, an extraordinary story – not enough, perhaps, to make it a great novel and for that you have to add i

n Némirovsky’s incredible skills as a writer and observer of human behaviour. Given that she was writing the novel with an ever deepening sense of her own death at the hands of the Nazis it is all the more extraordinary that she handles their presence in her novel, and the occupation of France by the Germans, with such humanity and sensitivity and decides to tackle themes in the novel which are far larger than her own personal story.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road – the story of a father and son escaping from the North through a horribly desolate and scorched landscape and heading toward what they hoped to be a safer and less damaged South. The first part of Némirovsky’s book describes the exodus from Paris on the eve of the German invasion and there were many moments while I was reading this part of her novel when I thought of the The Road – a very different book but one that was also able to throw a brilliant light on how human’s can behave when all of the social and cultural props have been removed.

As this blog is about the English language I really concentrated in that post on talking a little about how the rules of English can be bent by an author to achieve certain effects. In this post, along the same lines, I don’t really want to talk about the story or even about the tragic real-life background which it so brilliantly describes – I really think that this is a bitter-sweet pleasure best left up to you as the reader. What I do want to have a quick look at are some of the notes in the Appendix 1 of the book which give an insight into Némirovsky’s writing process and which provide invaluable lessons for anyone who would like to write and that I am hoping all our English4Today Creative Writing Course students will read.  Again, I am going to talk about one or two isolated notes that I found revealing about the writing process and after that I’m hoping that you will be interested enough to read the book yourself.

These notes are all taken from Némirovsky’s jottings for the Suite Française and are in Appendix 1 of the book. They need no extra comment from me so I have added them here for you to read and think about in terms of your own writing:

Treating her theme:

* If I want to create something striking, it is not misery I will show but the prosperity that contrasts with it… Contrasts! Yes, there’s something to that, something that can be very powerful and very new.

* …it’s like music when you sometimes hear the whole orchestra, sometimes just the violin.

* What interests me here is the history of the world.

* I must create something great and stop wonderin...

In an earlier post I talked a little about how an understanding of English grammar can take you a long way to being a better communicator and a better learner. In this post I want to take a quick look at some ideas that push the way we use language, or perhaps language uses us, to shape the world around us in very specific ways.

A little while ago I was re-reading Marshal McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and came across his thoughts on the influence of the building ‘blocks’ of English – the phonetic alphabet. I thought I’d throw some of these in here even if you may feel they take the case for the power of the alphabet a bit too far!

Our alphabet, according to McLuhan, where ‘semantically meaningless letters are used to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds‘ (unlike, for example, Chinese ideograms) is the ‘secret of Western power over man and nature alike‘.

McLuhan’s argument is that the phonetic alphabet breaks up into a linear and progressive mode experience that is, of its nature, not at all linear or progressive and that this is why:

‘ Western industrial programs have quite involuntarily been so militant,

and our military programs been so industrial. Both are shaped by the alphabet

in their technique of transformation and control by making all situations

uniform and continuous.’

His argument is that our language is at the very heart of how and why we do things the way we do. It constantly shapes and dictates our actions and perceptions. It’s a bit of a knock against the argument that we have much of a free will , that we really have much control over the way that we perceive and develop the world outside of ourselves.

But is he right? There is a powerful collection of English poetry and literature that argues that despite being saddled with a phonetic alphabet that ties us to the linear and progressive we are able to use language to convey the timeless, the non-linear, and the deeply experiential and to express that more holistic universe that, according to McLuhan, our language stops us from fully perceiving.

McLuhan’s world where we have carefully constructed our complex reality around ‘semantically meaningless letters … used to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds‘ is a place where language has to find a way to describe and organize reality as we currently know it – rich in species, objects and ideas and for which we have developed an extensive vocabulary to describe it along with other linguistic tools such as metaphor and allusion to reach into those areas that the linear and progressive can’t get into.

Later in the week I want to have a look at another book, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, where language, in the face of a post-apocalyptic world devoid of this rich diversity and variety, is stripped back to its bones and where most of the vocabulary that we use with such confidence is rendered meaningless or impotent. In many ways, this second book, redeems, language, our language, if only by showing what we would lose should it no longer be able or required to describe the complex fragile, world that we live in – linear and progressive or not!

Read more

* Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

*

Question from English4Today member Vin in the USA:

What is it called when letters are substituted for words, e.g., ‘LOL ‘stands for ‘Laugh out loud’.

Answer

Hi Vin, they are everywhere and they are called ‘acronyms‘!

An acronym was originally a pronounceable word made from the initial letters of other words. For example, NATO for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

As acronyms have invaded our lives more and more we have started to coin other shorthand versions such as TV for Television, USA for United States of America, IOU for I Owe You (a debt), MD for Medical Doctor, or CEO for Chief Executive Officer which are not acronyms in the original sense of being a ‘new pronounceable word’ made up of the first letters but which we still pull into our bulging bag of acronyms.

Acronyms are often used as mnemonics, a device for helping you remember something. You’ll often see this sort of usage in training manuals and self-help manuals. An illustration of this sort of acronym would be one that I found on a quick trawl of the Internet; taking the word ‘HOPE’ as an acronym for ‘Hanging Onto Positive Expectations’. You may remember other similar acronyms from your school days designed to help you remember a spelling rule, historical event or math equation. I remember, for example, ROYGBIV, a mnemonic acronym for remembering the colors of the rainbow – Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet – a pretty senseless sounding acronym but one that has stuck in my mind since I was around seven years old!

But where acronyms have really exploded and become a sub-language of their own is through text messaging, the Internet and email where the ‘need for speed’ has led to the creation of hundreds of new acronyms that are used globally by millions of people. Your example, LOL for ‘Laugh Out Loud’ is one of the most used of these Internet acronyms. Here is a list of some of the other common Internet acronyms used in emails, SMS and text messaging. Hope it helps, CU!

Common Acronyms Used in SMS, Text and Internet Chat:

A

AFAIK

As far as I know

AFK

Away from keyboard

AKA

Also known as

AOL

America Online

ASAP

As soon as possible

ASL

Age, sex, location

ATM

At the moment

B

B/C

Because

B4

Before

BBIAB

Be back in a bit

BBL

Be back later

BCC

Blind carbon copy

BF

Boyfriend

BFF

Best friends forever

BFN

Bye for now

BOT

Back on topic

BRB

Be right back

BTW

By the way

C

CC

Carbon copy

CTN

Can’t talk now

CU

See you

CUL

See you later

CYA

See ya

CYE

Check your e-mail

D

DIY

Do it yourself

DL

Download

DW

Don’t worry

E

EG

Exempli gratia (Latin: For example)

EOD

End of discussion

ETA

Estimated time of arrival

F

F

Female

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

FOFL

Falling on the floor laughing