Apr 16, 2017 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: the mother of all Last week, the US military dropped the largest conventional (i.e. non-nuclear) bomb it has ever used in combat on an area in eastern Afghanistan that contained a complex of tunnels and bunkers used by militants connected to Daesh, the group often referred to in the West as Islamic State or ISIS. After the bombing, US […]
Apr 11, 2017 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: second wind I spent last week at the annual IATEFL conference, which this year was held in Glasgow. I’ve been speaking at the conference for almost twenty years now, and it’s always an amazing experience. You get to meet loads and loads of people who do basically the same kind of job as you do; you get […]
Apr 9, 2017 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: do time I was chatting to a Spanish friend of mine the other day and she was telling me the sorry story of her ex-husband. Apparently, after they separated, he drifted into a life of petty crime and started dealing – mostly just grass, and not in large quantities, but enough to attract the attention of the […]
Apr 6, 2017 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: have a good innings In one of my classes recently, we were looking at vocabulary connected to illnesses and there was a sentence about how diseases spread. I mentioned that they can spread around the world – from person to person – but also within the body. So, for instance, certain kinds of cancer often spread quite quickly. A […]
Apr 2, 2017 Chunks, Word of the day Word of the day: palaver During my trip to Norilsk last week, I managed to squeeze in a day trip to Dudinka, a small port town situated on the mighty Yenisei River that’s mainly used to ship out the nickel which is found in such abundance in the area. We had a brief guided tour of the town and then […]
