If you’re indoors, take a moment and look at the door of the room you’re sitting in. And if you’re outdoors, try and have a look around to spot a door in sight. Stare at it for a moment. What you’re looking at is not just a plank of wood or metal, it’s something much …
English
The phrase “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” is not your classic, old-English idiom. This phrase, that reverberates within each of us takes its roots from a 2004 song from the American rock band, Green Day. The phrase was used even before that by Al Dubin in 1933 where he released a song by the same name, …
Everyone knows that communication on the internet has its oddities. There are memes, where people make endless different captions for a single image. There are acronyms which don’t make sense unless you spend lots of time online. And, of course, there are smileys (also known as emoticons or emoji). In this post, we’ll take a …
Every language has a basic kind of word order for sentences. In English, the subject of a sentence usually comes at the beginning, followed by the verb and the predicate. The key word there is “usually”! If you’re relieved that you’ve finally got English word order down, brace yourself: Sometimes, it can be changed! There …
We seek to know what a particular word means to make sense of a phrase, and we also try to make sense of a phrase to be able to understand the holistic meaning of a clause. Once we understand what the clause means, we can then go back to the specific linguistic elements that govern …
These days, many employers do not have the time to read through every resume that they are given. Some positions receive hundreds of resumes from applicants, thus many companies are turning toward automated resume-checking. This type of resume review checks for certain keywords to determine who passes, so it’s important to get it right! The …
The saying “if wishes were fishes we’d all swim in riches” features the literary device known as assonance. Assonance is also called “vowel rhyme,” and is a resemblance of sounds caused by the repetition of the same vowel sounds in multiple words. In this sentence, the assonance is the repetition of the “I” sound. This …
Are you in a situation where you want to delay accepting or rejecting a job offer after all the tedious recruitment-related processes you had to endure? For a lot of people, it is a lot tougher to talk someone out in spoken conversations than in written ones. But, is it really that much of an …
Our ability to be in constant communication with one another via text messaging apps has changed the way we use language. The reality is that many of us now spend more time texting our friends than actually speaking to them. There are considerable changes in the way we use language that have occurred as a …