‘ We have a focus in the garden ,' claimed a student in a written assignment on his house. A focus is a physical term; it is a point or distance at which the outline of an object is clearly seen by the eye or through a lens. The student and his family have a fireplace in the garden, i.e. an open space for a fire surrounded by large stones or brick walls. The floor at the bottom of a fireplace is called a hearth , which (but not a fireplace) can also be used figuratively in the meaning of home and family life.
‘Why did you do so badly in the test?' I asked a student who normally does much better in English exams. ‘Because I had a window,' he answered. Well, when you can't remember anything, your mind goes blank and you have a blackout, not a window. So you'd better say ‘I had a blackout' in such a situation. A window is somehow connected with a blackout, though, as blackouts are used as coverings for windows to stop outside light from coming into a room. A blackout is also a period when there is no light as a result of an electrical power failure. I wonder why we sometimes have a blackout. I remember a girl sitting her oral school-leaving exam. One of her tasks was very simple - she had to name parts of the human body. She wasn't able to name many of them, but later, when she was travelling home, she suddenly remembered everything. The jitters, probably.
‘He looks delicious,' said a girl describing an attractive young man in a photograph. We know what she meant, but the adjective ‘delicious' isn't normally used for describing a person's appearance. It usually describes something having a very pleasant taste or smell, especially food. The adjective ‘cute' is mostly used in the meaning of physically attractive, so ‘He looks cute' would have been a more appropriate sentence for the above-mentioned situation.
‘Where is Mark?' I asked a class at the beginning of a lesson. ‘He is missing,' answered one of the students promptly. ‘Poor Mark, are the police looking for him?' I replied, trying to make fun of the mistake. When somebody is missing, they cannot be found at home or in any other of their usual places, i.e. they are lost. When a student is not present at school because of illness, etc., they are absent, not missing.
‘I visited a lot of interesting actions,' said a student talking about her summer holidays. Try to identify two lexical mistakes in the sentence. Have you got them? Let's check. Firstly, the noun ‘action' is our false friend. A planned public or social occasion is an event, not an action. Secondly, the verbs visit and attend are often confused by foreign users of English. You normally attend (= are present at) a performance, concert, wedding or funeral. You also attend (= go regularly to) school, university or church. On the other hand, you visit (= go to see a person or a place) your grandparents, London, the theatre or a museum. (You can use both verbs before some nouns; for example, you attend/visit a festival.) All in all, the girl's sentence should have read as follows: ‘I attended a lot of interesting events.'
Another typical example of incorrect usage of the noun ‘action' is provided in the following sentence: ‘I bought this sweatshirt in action.' When you buy something at a reduced price, you buy it at a discount, not in action. A price that is lower than the usual one is a discounted price, not an action price. Supermarkets, hypermarkets, etc. often have special offers (reductions in the normal prices of some products), not actions.
When we deal with the topic of food in our lessons, students often use expressions such as Swedish tables or Italian kitchen. A meal at which you serve yourself from a large range of hot and cold dishes is called a buffet or smorgasbord. It is not just a coincidence, though, that we call such a meal ‘Swedish tables', as it does come from Swedish, as does the word ‘smorgasbord'. What we sometimes incorrectly call an ‘Italian kitchen' is, in fact, Italian cuisine (similarly, we can speak about French, Chinese, Czech, Slovak, etc., cuisine - pronounced /kwi'zi:n/). The noun kitchen is only used for naming a room, nothing else.
All right, that's it for this month's issue. Don't hesitate to use an interpretative dictionary - I mean, a monolingual dictionary, along with a Slovak-English one - it is a really useful thing.
