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Meet Cute
A meet cute is a convention of romantic comedies in which two potential romantic partners meet in a contrived way in unusual or comic circumstances. A staple of the romantic genre, the technique...
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Jumping the Shark
When a tv series ‘jumps the shark’ it means that the story arc reaches its peak, the storyline becomes ridiculous and the show loses credibility. The phrase comes from the television series Happy Days...
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What is a Jobsworth?
I tried to explain this to my students today, but as usual, Wikipedia does it a lot better: A jobsworth is a person who uses their job description in a deliberately uncooperative way, or who seemingly...
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Nails on a Blackboard
Advertising Agency: Ogilvy & Mather, Mumbai, India I wondering the other day if, due to the use of whiteboards these days, younger people will not understand things like the advertising campaign...
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Talk About having a frog in your throat!
photo by Angus James Australian angler Angus James found this tree frog inside the mouth of a jungle perch he had caught when he was removing the lure in order to throw it back into the water. The...
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Raining Cats and Dogs
This is an idiom I hear often from non-native speakers. But I don’t think I have ever heard a native speaker use it. This idiom is said to originate from times when houses had low thatched roofs made...
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Rickrolling
Rickrolling is an internet meme. An meme is something that spreads via the internet. If you click on a link that leads to the Rick Astley video for ‘Never gonna give you up’ you have been Rickrolled....
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When language does not translate across cultures
This hilarious fail from an Osaka department store in Japan was reported in various media yesterday. When I saw it and before I read the article, I assumed that it had been because someone thought...
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Why can English speakers no longer use their language properly?
There was an energetic discussion yesterday in one of the dog groups I frequent about the number of dog breeders using the word weary instead of wary. As in, Boerboels need to be weary of strangers....
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It’s SCAPEgoat, not ESCAPE goat!
Although the way things are going, I will not be surprised if everyone is using escape goat in a decade or two, more’s the pity. From Wikipedia The scapegoat by William Holman Hunt A scapegoat is a...
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To gird one’s loins
Although I think if you did that nowadays, you would probably be arrested! Or fired!
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The Streisand Effect
The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually...
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