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.
Category Archives: Style
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”.
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.
Hitting the right register
Dutch is rich in synonyms (often pairs with Germanic and Latinate roots). The nuances of usage aren’t quite the same – and it’s an issue in English too.
They seek him here, they seek him there
To ‘seek’ is another of those words that are very similar to a much more everyday Dutch equivalent. It therefore gets heavily overused in Dunglish.
Well-equipped
This mask is equipped with an elastic band. This playground is equipped with a slide. This jacket is equipped with large pockets. What’s wrong with “has”?
Playing for keeps
There are a few small words that bespeckle native English yet are rarely used by non-natives. A very useful one is “keep”.
Zero Dark Thirty
There are all kinds of ways of expressing times and writing them down, but the commonest formats in English aren’t the same as the usual Dutch ones.
Trajectories are for ballistics
The curve taken under gravity by a thrown object, or a metaphorical upward progression such as a career. Not a generic synonym for a route or pathway.
