Grammar Guru: Needless or needlessly?

Last week, 9 out of 11 chose “take a break” over “make a break”. In German “Let’s take a break” is “Machen wir doch mal eine Pause.” When pairs of words in different languages are very similar but have different meanings, they are called “false friends”. Similar collocations (or word partnerships) don’t always mean the […]

Asimov deconstructed

What Is Intelligence, Anyway? by Isaac Asimov What is intelligence, anyway? When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a […]

How I learned Latin… and French

Since I grew up bilingual in German and English, Latin was the first foreign language I learned. My dad taught me Latin when I was 5, using the Nature Method, a book of texts featuring a family with kids my age on up, talking about everyday life, with a brother beating up on his little […]

Grammar Guru: make/take a break

Every single visitor who did the “used to” poll last week got it right – congratulations! “I’m used to getting up at 6. And you?” (talking about my habits) is sometimes confused with: “I used to get up at 5, but now I sleep until 6″. So I used to do something that I don’t […]

That takes the cake

A few days ago I said that a presentation “takes the cake“, meaning it was great. Now I just saw that Macmillan defines “take the cake” like this: take the cake to be the worst, most shocking, or most annoying example of something I’ve heard some ridiculous excuses before, but that takes the cake. Isn’t […]

Gender matters

Lera Boroditsky discusses her research on differences in gender stereotypes in HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? (www.edge.org, June 12). She asks “Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives?” She thinks they do: In one study, […]