A noose around the neck is an expression that means you are out of options. As the noose, a tightening rope knot moves closer to the throat, the subject is close to death, the deathknot, if you like.
For instance, I can say, to avoid the morning rush hour traffic, I usually leave my house an hour early. In this context, prevent is a misfit. However, if I say “to prevent heat stroke on hot summer days, drink plenty of water and stay out of the sun”.
English demands that its users know more than just the meaning of a word. They also must know how it’s used. It’s not okay to slap just any words together.…
Inspired by Sue de Groot’s column in the Sunday Times, I am writing about my own grammar gremlin findings of the past few days. In this period I read a…
In my job, as sub-editor at a community newspaper, I had to reprimand a reporter for shoddy work. His report was submitted for subbing with several repeated paragraphs. When I…
In much of my research for clients in the past couple of months I have often seen the term black swan. As I know swans to be white in most…
The English language is so rich and diverse that one lifetime is just not enough to master all of it. But I have discovered that as much as English owes…
The other day, a friend asked, “How do you spell towing the line as in the sense of complying? Is it toing or towing? This is just one of many…
Today I’d like to share these word pairs that always confuse new writers. Not to sound arrogant there are plenty words in the English language that I need to check…
