Sep 10, 2017 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: one for the road As you may have noticed from our last post, we ran our first-ever Lexical Lab summer school in London this summer. As well as designing, running and teaching on the courses, we also put together a full social and cultural programme for everyone. Most afternoons, we took students to less-visited corners of London that we […]
Sep 3, 2017 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: I think not One of the courses we ran this July as part of our very first Lexical Lab summer school was ADVANCED LANGUAGE AND CULTURE, which lasted two weeks and which explored everything from the class system to education to Brexit to women’s issues to race and immigration. It was a wonderful course to design and write […]
May 21, 2017 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: rule of thumb My mother turned 70 last month and to celebrate we took her to Majorca for a week-long break. We rented a villa in Puerto Pollensa up on the north coast. It was just about large enough for my mum and her partner, John; my brother, his wife and their adopted kid, Jamie; John’s daughter from […]
May 16, 2017 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: go pear-shaped Last night I was at our local pub quiz. For anyone who hasn’t experienced this, basically it’s an excuse for people to get together and drink, but at the same time it allows ourselves to feel that we are not drunks or layabouts because we are actually proving our great intelligence and knowledge. Never mind […]
May 4, 2017 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: a big If We use the phrase that’s / it’s a big if to show that we realise that what we are about to say – or what someone has just been speculating about – is really very unlikely indeed to actually happen. It’s a sign that we’re clutching at straws, which means we’re still clinging on to […]
