Somebody at work keeps using the phrase next next week to refer to the week after next. This made me curious. Is “next next” actually correct English? From my search through online discussions by native speakers, it appears that it is not a generally accepted or even very popular expression. Although there is an entry
The words lecture and course are both used in connection with education. Consulting the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries, we have lecture = a talk that is given to a group of people to teach them about a particular subject and course = a series of lessons or lectures on a particular subject. Especially German native speakers
The English language makes it relatively easy to write in a gender-neutral way because nouns in general do not have a gender; a gender is only specified when referring to people or animals. Hence, there is only one indefinite article (the) and two definite articles (a or an, see here). Compare this to German, where
Today I want to address a mistake that is very common among non-native speakers, namely the confusion of how and what … like in forming questions. While I always had a reasonably good intuition when to use which, I learned that there is actually some logic behind it. According to my trusted book Practical English
Inspired by a recent stay in a hotel (see picture), let me point out a subtle but important difference in meaning between the verbs treat and invite. The situation is made even trickier by the fact that other languages (in particular German) do not have this distinction. Consider the following two sentences: (1) I would
I recently came across a scientific paper in which the authors (who struggled with the English language quite a bit throughout the text) used “to testify” instead of “to test”. However, the meaning of these two verbs is very different. According to the OED, to testify means either 1. to make a statement that something
Here is an interesting grammatical fact about the nouns mail and email. In English, mail is an uncountable noun (see here), which means that Send me a mail is not grammatical. However, even though email (or E-mail) is a short form of electronic mail, it can be both countable and uncountable (see here). Hence, Send
During a recent trip, I noticed that many flight attendants mispronounce the word fasten (as in “fasten your seatbelt”). This is quite surprising given that they use this word very often (I’ll come back to often). In contrast to the word fast, the letter t in fasten is not pronounced. Instead, fasten is pronounced as
The abbreviation KO (also K.O.) stands for knock out. It has its origin in the sport of boxing. Interestingly, in colloquial German, KO is often used in phrases such as Ich bin ein wenig KO (= I am a bit exhausted) or Er ist ganz schön KO (= He is quite exhausted). However, I don’t
Many job adverts these days ask for excellent English skills, even if the job is in a country where English is not the official language. This requirement is often motivated by the wish of a company to act and appear truly international (the modern word is global), and of course by its business relations in