Mar 14, 2018 Chunks, Word of the day Word of the day: social mobility Social mobility is the idea that over their lifetimes or across generations, people from lower-class backgrounds can move to a higher social class. An example of this would be my father, who grew up in relative poverty in Liverpool before the war. He was the son of a factory worker, but he then won a […]
Mar 9, 2018 Chunks, Word of the day Word of the day: cowboy If, like many foreign students, the main image that comes into your head when you think of cowboys involves men in big hats and long boots, riding horses and heading off into the sunset somewhere in America, then you may be wondering what on earth the photo above has to do with cowboys. You’d probably […]
Mar 5, 2018 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: raining cats and dogs We’re joking, of course. This is really NOT our chunk of the day. Only students of English and people who haven’t lived in the UK since about 1950 actually use this idiom – and it probably wasn’t even used that much back in the Fifties either! However, as London has now returned to normal after the […]
Mar 1, 2018 Chunk of the day, Chunks Chunk of the day: adverse weather conditions Over recent days, the news has been full of dire warnings. We’ve been urged to batten down the hatches and prepare to be hit hard by what’s being called the Beast from the East! Quite what the former heavyweight boxing champion of the world, Wladimir Klitschko, would make of the fact that he seems to […]
Feb 26, 2018 Chunks, Word of the day Word of the day: mate I witnessed a rather entertaining scene yesterday afternoon outside a tube station in north London. The wallet of a middle-aged man somehow managed to drop out of his back pocket as he was leaving the station, and a younger – foreign – man saw this, picked it up and tried to get the attention of […]
