Jumbo
So we were talking in Catalan about something very large, and my son said: “in English you can use jumbo, right? Like a jumbo-sized sandwich or burger or other horrid pile of chemicals masquerading as food. Jumbo screen. Jumbo pack. Jumbo prawn.” “Jumbo jet!” I yelled. How on earth could I have missed that one […]
Flipchart
I needed a flipchart (back in the dark days before I had a smartphone). And I could not for the life of me remember how to say it in Spanish or Catalan. Actually, I don’t think I ever knew. The dictionary turned up ‘rotafolio’ which I’d never heard before, and nor had the people in […]
Snoreathon
The first time I came across the word ‘snoreathon’, I fell about laughing. It’s so amusing and evocative. How was the match / the movie / your date? A total snoreathon. You glue a bit of ancient Greek place name to an onomatopoeic middle English verb and you got it: mind-deadening please-make-it-stop tedium beyond endurance. […]
Talking about Talking
‘He pontificates, and she rabbits on,’ said my friend witheringly, by way of explaining why he would not be having dinner with a certain couple we know. I grinned in delight at the precision, the graphicness, the concision: he bang hit the nail on the head about the people in question. But look how easy […]
Pop Until You Drop
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]It was 1995, and I’d just started my new job writing SpeakUp Movies: booklets designed to make original-version commercial movies comprehensible to Spanish-speaking students of English. A large part of the work involved writing an English-Spanish glossary to the screenplay. This glossary was to include notes on anything that we thought needed explanation or clarification: […]
Slinky
“What does ‘slink’ mean?” Robert asked me. (Apparently he was trawling through the entire list of English irregular verbs.) As usual, I’m unable to give a straight answer / translation. The word immediately conjures up a picture in my head: feline, silent, sinuous, leopard print, black leather… that old Shania Twain video… “Like this,” I […]