But not only students; even a certain sports shop in Prague put the following advertisement in English in its shopwindow, trying to attract foreign tourists: ‘We sell football dresses.’ As far as I know, a dress is primarily a piece of women’s clothing made in one piece and covering the body down to the legs. The items of clothing the shop was actually selling were football shirts, i.e. pieces of clothing with a number on the back worn by footballers or football fans. The word strip is used to name a uniform that is worn by members of a sports team during a match (or it is simply called the team’s uniform), and the collocation sports dress (in which dress is an uncountable noun) can be used in the meaning of sports clothes and sportswear.
A student once called leather shoes used for playing football kickers. A kicker, however, is a player who kicks a ball. His shoes are called football boots in British English and cleats in American English.
‘The woman is wearing a black costume,’ said a student describing a picture. She was actually wearing a black suit, i.e. a jacket and a skirt. Women can also wear a trouser suit, i.e. a jacket and trousers designed to be worn together (a pantsuit in American English). The student could also have said that the woman was wearing a black outfit, i.e. a set of clothes worn together, especially for a particular occasion or purpose. We use the word costume for clothes worn by people from a particular place or during a particular historical period, or by actors and actresses in a play or film.
Students sometimes incorrectly call a man’s tie that is tied in the shape of a bow and worn on the neck a butterfly. However, the noun butterfly has only two meanings in English – it is either a flying insect or a swimming stroke. The piece of clothing we are talking about is called a bow tie.
I once asked one of my classes to write any fairy tale they knew in English. Some of them chose the well-known story about a little girl, her grandmother and a greedy wolf. They called the little girl Red Hat, Red Cap, or even Red Beret. Nice tries, but in the English version, she is normally called Little Red Riding Hood.
A student talking about her favourite sport claimed that she needed a small ball and a rocket to play tennis. Well, maybe she plays a new special variant of it, something like space tennis, since a rocket is a vehicle for travelling in space (or a missile carrying a bomb, or a firework that explodes in the air). A piece of sports equipment used for hitting a ball in tennis is a racket, which can also be spelled racquet.
Be careful with using the word concurrence when talking about sport or business. It is a false friend. A situation in which sportsmen and sportswomen or profit-making organizations compete against each other is competition or rivalry. Concurrence is either agreement or an example of two or more things happening at the same time. A person or an organization that competes against others is a competitor or a rival, not a concurrent, which is not even a noun. It is an adjective which means existing or happening at the same time.
Now, let me ask you a trick question. What is the difference between a woman coach and a women’s coach? Any ideas? Well, a woman coach is a female coach (as opposed to a male one), and a women’s coach is one who coaches women (as opposed to one coaching men). Thus, a woman who coaches women is a woman women’s coach, to be perfectly accurate.
Speaking of coaches, let’s have a look at the following sign: ‘No football coaches allowed!’ It can convey different meanings in the UK and the USA. In British English, besides a person who trains sportspeople, a coach is a comfortable bus for carrying passengers over long distances. So in the UK, the sign can be ambiguous – it can concern either bus drivers transporting footballers or football trainers.
I saw a part of a US comedy film called Vybíjaná in the Slovak version the other day. I have always been interested in whether people in English-speaking countries play a sport similar to our vybíjaná and what they call it. In that comedy, there were two teams of six players using six balls, trying to hit each other with the balls and avoid being hit at the same time. The game was called dodgeball in the original. The point is that to dodge means the very opposite of our verb vybiť – to move quickly and suddenly to one side in order to avoid something or somebody. So the word-for-word translation of the game of dodgeball would be “vyhýbaná“ or something like that.
