Posted on 04/02/2021 9:44:59 AM PDT by sodpoodle
Something like this isn’t strange to native English speakers until they start thinking about it. I teach ESL and I know what a challenge this can be to people who are learning English. Over the years, I have come up (there is is again) with various explanations that I hope make these oddities easier to understand.
One day we had this sentence — “They were afraid when the alarm went off.” I asked the students, “Was the alarm off or on?” They all said it was off. No, I told them, it was on. They looked at me as if I were crazy. In thirty-plus years of teaching, I had never had to explain this, and, in sixty-plus years of speaking English, had never really thought about it, so I told them I would enlighten them at the next class, which I did. I had to think about some other ways we use, “go off,” and that helped me to explain it.
That story sounds a little off to me. Why bring it up?
: )
Don’t forget the UP - Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Ask Bill Clinton.
It was a better world when we used to lock up criminals and, sometimes, even string them up.
“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the—if he—if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement. Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true.”
Why is it that “slow up” and “slow down” mean the same thing?
What’s up with this thread?
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