OWAD's phrase of the day is "hoist the Jolly Roger", which according to them means "get ready to fight" and has 40,000 Google hits. They give an example from a BBC news headline: "St. Pauli ready to HOIST THE JOLLY ROGER over the Bundesliga" and suggest smuggling this new phrase into your conversation by saying "Get ready to hoist the Jolly Roger, the competition are about to drastically reduce prices".
I guess you could try that, but you'd certainly raise a few eyebrows. "Hoist the Jolly Roger" is something you'd only say in the context of pirates; as OWAD points out, the Jolly Roger is the pirate flag. The one with the skull and crossbones. The one St. Pauli fans use, hence the BBC headline.
Google UK gets 83 hits for "hoist the Jolly Roger". All of them are connected to piracy or the Adam and the Ants song of this name.
Showing posts with label OWAD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OWAD. Show all posts
Monday, 6 September 2010
Tuesday, 13 October 2009
OWAD teaches me English
Recently discovered OWAD - One Word A Day, which selects English words that "occur in educated British-American conversation" but are "unknown to most German speakers of English". These words are "within the most frequent 50,000" in the "World Bank of English" and will apparently impress your British and American acquaintances. The writer says "I would ask you to please trust me that the words I offer are useful. "
I've been subscribed for one day and the first word I got was "putpockets". I've never heard it before. Now I've been away from the UK for a while, so I'm willing to concede that my vocab may not be up to date, but I'd like to check how useful this word might be.
First I check the "World Bank of English", of course. I look it up on Google. Two hits.
I discover that the University of Birmingham has a "400 million word Bank of English Corpus" - which is evidently what OWAD is talking about.
It seems the Bank of English is subscription only. I try the related free concordance search but it doesn't seem to work. So I'll have to try Google to find out how common my new word is.
"Putpockets" gets 62,000 hits, but when you go to the last page of results there are 533 hits.
The first is the newspaper article quoted on OWAD, entitled "Putpockets" give Londoners a little extra cash. The quotation marks in the article tell you that this is an unusual word, perhaps a newly coined one. The article is about former pickpockets going round London putting money back into people's pockets. Hence "putpockets".
I whiz through the first three pages of Google hits and they are all news stories based on this article. I look through random pages of hits. Pages 10, 19, 28, 37, 46 and 54 (the last page) of the Google hits are also all stories based on this article.
Which seems to sum it all up really.
I've been subscribed for one day and the first word I got was "putpockets". I've never heard it before. Now I've been away from the UK for a while, so I'm willing to concede that my vocab may not be up to date, but I'd like to check how useful this word might be.
First I check the "World Bank of English", of course. I look it up on Google. Two hits.
I discover that the University of Birmingham has a "400 million word Bank of English Corpus" - which is evidently what OWAD is talking about.
It seems the Bank of English is subscription only. I try the related free concordance search but it doesn't seem to work. So I'll have to try Google to find out how common my new word is.
"Putpockets" gets 62,000 hits, but when you go to the last page of results there are 533 hits.
The first is the newspaper article quoted on OWAD, entitled "Putpockets" give Londoners a little extra cash. The quotation marks in the article tell you that this is an unusual word, perhaps a newly coined one. The article is about former pickpockets going round London putting money back into people's pockets. Hence "putpockets".
I whiz through the first three pages of Google hits and they are all news stories based on this article. I look through random pages of hits. Pages 10, 19, 28, 37, 46 and 54 (the last page) of the Google hits are also all stories based on this article.
One blogger on the Telegraph says "The whole wheeze, known as Putpockets, is a publicity stunt dreamed up by a broadband supply company".
One blog comment says "I live in England and its the first I've heard of it! Many of the Stories from the US about England are straight from Fantasy Island."Which seems to sum it all up really.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
