Category Archives: Word of the Day

Bravo Rafa! and some tennis vocabulary

Word of the Day,

Great, great Rafa! Although he was not at his peak, he was hungry for the prize  and Rafa Nadal has just won his 6th Roland Garros title and  maintains  his top position in ATP rankings which, in case of losing this final ,  he might  have given to Djokovic. And what is more, he  has equaled Bjorn Borg’s record of six Roland Garros titles .

Have you seen the match? Could you understand the umpire? Tennis has got a lot of words that might be Greek to some of you. If you want to learn what some of them refer to , read the list below to learn some of them and then next time you watch a tennis match , listen for these words you have just learned.

♥ATP Association of Tennis Professionals. The ATP are the governing body of the men’s professional tennis circuit.

♥Serve the shot that begins each point, in which the server hits the ball after tossing it into the air

♥Love no points

♥Match point the last point that a player needs to win in order to win a match

♥Ace a very fast serve that your opponent cannot reach with their racket

♥Deuce the score in tennis when both players have 40 points.

♥Lob a shot that is hit in a high arc, usually over the opponent’s head

♥Tiebreaker an extra game played to decide who will win when both players have six games each.

♥Rally a long series of shots

♥Let a service that hits the net and must be played again

♥Grand Slam the four most prestigious tournaments; Wimbledon ,Roland Garros and the U.S. and Australian Opens

♥Crosscourt a shot in which the ball is hit diagonally across the court

♥Advantage used for saying the name of a player who scores a point after ‘deuce’ , For ex: Advantage Nadal

If you feel you want to learn more vocab  about tennis, click here. Thank you Rafa, you are a legend!

Word of the Day: Thesaurus

Dictionaries, Word of the Day

A Thesaurus    is a reference book in which words with similar meanings are grouped together ( it contains synonyms and sometimes antonyms).

Try this site and see how a Thesaurus can help you online.

 

Writing can be a daunting task when you cannot quite think of just the right word to convey your ideas without sounding redundant and boring. A free thesaurus online is an invaluable resource offering expedient gold mines of vocabulary. To check thesaurus sites available can also be time-consuming. However, one site that will place thesaurus synonyms at your fingertips is thesaurus.net. Our free thesaurus online resource offers a thesaurus dictionary online where your only task is to enter a word you find yourself unnecessarily overusing. This English thesaurus will quickly provide an array of possible synonyms that can be used to enhance writing.

 

 

Word of the Day: to Lose Weight

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Never have  I seen so many people around me trying to lose some weight . Spring must be the season when we realize there is no way we will be able to  hide our love handles (excess fat around the hips and buttocks, sometimes also called saddle bags– I imagine they are called  this way  when they are  big and ugly) .

Anyway, when it is not summertime and you’re not looking your best, you can always use this funny tool  to make you look thinner, even though you haven’t bothered to go on a diet to lose a bit of weight or go to the gym to sweat off your excess of baggage in the treadmill.

The tool I was telling you about is called slimpic.com and with only a few clicks, you can make yourself or someone in your pictures gain or lose weight (the point  here is losing weight, we don’t need to go to the Internet searching for tools to make us look uglier, do we?).

Me, before and with 10kgs less! if only it were so easy!

Word of the day : To get drunk and the like

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I’ve been away for a short school trip and that’s the reason why I haven’t been posting for a week.

Though in my forties, this one has been my first school trip,ever. My father was not a big fan of school trips and me and my sisters were never allowed to go; we were sent to Great Britain or France  instead, to study the language under the wings of some religious institution or other. What he didn’t know is that, even under their watchful eyes,  I had my fair share of unpleasant and pleasant (if you know what I mean) experiences.

And, in this school trip, and as a teacher, my role was trying that my students didn’t experience any unpleasant things, which they might think were pleasant enough to try. But, unfortunately, I caught two students red-handed trying to smuggle alcohol into their bedrooms. Pity, they were kept in detention and couldn’t enjoy the disco!

In English as in any other language there are countless alternatives to the traditional to get drunk

So, let’s imagine that you and your friends decide to go out on a bender/binge or maybe  go pub crawling or bar hopping to get drunk and after two or three beers you are a bit tipsy (slightly drunk) because you challenged one of your friends you could drink him under the table (drink more than him without getting drunk)and then you realized you could not hold your drink (drink without getting drunk) and that  he drinks like a fish. So,  you decide to go home but your friends decide to  go on drinking and after two hours they are loaded /wasted/gone/slushed/hammered/legless/plastered or pissed  and one of them starts to puke/spew/gag/chunder/barf, which is quite disgusting.

You phone your friend in the morning and find out he can’t even talk to you because he’s got the worst hangover and needs to take an alka-setzer and get some more sleep.

Do you know any other expressions ?