There seems to be a common belief that the possessive form must only be used for animate objects. That is (of course) complete bollocks.
Author Archives: Mike Wilkinson
Woods, forests and jungles
Your everyday, common-or-garden patch of countryside with trees is a wood or woodland. Forests are bigger, darker and nastier; jungles are definitely more exotic.
Among other things
Although it’s valid English, it’s not all that common a phrase and often not the most natural equivalent of the Dutch “onder andere”.
South America, West Africa, North Korea
None of these take a hyphen in English. Simple.
Arithmetic
Hold on, that’s the same in all languages… isn’t it?
Ambition
Ambition isn’t always purely about positive goals. There can be overtones of being hell-bent on achieving them: being greedy, self-serving and unscrupulous.
The muscles of the legs of the sprinter
Using possessive forms and adjectival nouns rather than “of the” can make your writing a lot more succinct.
Quartermaster
A quartermaster is a low or mid-level military administrator responsible for supplies and equipment, not some kind of high-level official trailblazer for projects.
Ordinal numbers
All ordinal numbers can be written in Dutch with a superscript “e” but that isn’t the case in English: first, second and third each need the last two letters to be used.
Not only… but also
The phrase “but also” refers back to an earlier part of the sentence (usually flagged with “not only”) to add extra or even contrasting information. It can’t start a sentence or stand alone.
