My brother-in-law was astonished when I said I was getting Clare a beamer for Christmas. An SUV or a soft-top?
Category Archives: Fake English
Invented abbreviations
They’re confusing enough as it is. Don’t go inventing your own!
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.
Qualitative
In English, this word is almost only ever used as the counterpart of “quantitative”: it doesn’t mean “high-quality”.
Medical Latin
Don’t assume that Latin in Dutch medical texts will be the same in English: this is often not the case. Abbreviations in particular can be incomprehensible to English speakers, even doctors
High wines and high breakfasts
What? No way. There’s “high tea”, a specific and very English concept. But you can’t misappropriate “high” for anything else.
Training
There’s no such thing as “a training”. You either receive training – a general, uncountable noun – or take a training course.
Joined-up writing
Backoffice. Accountmanager. Two English words glued together, used as a compound in Dutch. Which doesn’t make it correct in English!
Colophon
It’s not a word. (Well, just about, deep in the dark depths of the dictionary. But that doesn’t make it correct.)
