Let's talk about some words that you should probably forget and I'll tell you
what you should say instead.
What's up everyone? My name is Wes. This is interactive English,
which is all about helping you practice and improve your English skills.
So quite often we get asked, hey,
should I use this word or phrase? What's more common?
Is this word frequently used? This is a question that we get regularly.
So in today's lesson I want to talk about some words that are not commonly used
in English and some of you you probably haven't even heard of before,
and I want to tell you the words that you should use instead,
but also I want to show you some resources that you can use that will help you
answer that question.
If you're wondering which phrase or word is more commonly used,
these resources will help. Also as a disclaimer, I'm from the United States,
so I'll be giving you the American perspective when it comes to the usage of
these words.
Let's start with something that that's easy and straightforward and that is thou
the enzyme. So if you haven't heard of these words then, then that's,
there's a good reason for that.
It's because these are archaic and very old forms of the word you.
The word thou is used as the subject.
The would be the object and zine would be the possessive form. So for example,
I could say, thou needs to forget about these words.
I told the to stop using these and then I guess I could ask you what is thy
name? Let me know in the comments. Write your name. Say Hello.
I just want to hear from you. So as you can tell it,
it just sounds really awkward.
You're not going to hear these words out on the street and everyday spoken
English. You may hear them
if you are listening to a play and it's a very old play and they're using this
as part of the dialogue, or you could read about these words in a story.
The next that you can eliminate from your vocabulary is hither.
And what hither means is to go towards someplace.
And when I think of it being used,
I always think of the phrase and somebody saying, come hither, come hither.
They're telling somebody to come to them. Nowadays,
you're not going to tell somebody to come hither.
I guess you could ask them and say, Hey, could you please come over here or,
or tell them I, I'd like to ask you something. Or, again,
if you're talking about somebody you might be attracted to and you want to start
a conversation with them instead of telling them to come to you,
I think it's actually better for you to go to that person and introduce
yourself.
So the first resource that I want to show you is that just doing a Google search
for the word. And if we type in the word hither plus meaning,
well then it's going to bring up the definition of the word.
But if we move down to here where it says translations,
word origin and more definitions,
and click on that Arrow and then move down to the bottom.
And you can see the use over time for this word and hither has declined
dramatically in the last 200 years.
We can do the same with that if we want to see its usage. And if we scroll down,
you can see that it has also declined a lot.
Are you ready for more words? Then we have salutations.
So this is a word that I,
you may not have heard somebody say in spoken English. It's not very common.
But you may read it in a story and what it means is, well, it's just a greeting.
It's a fancy way of greeting somebody and just saying,
hello salutations. When I think of this word,
I think of the story Charlotte's web because the two main characters, Charlotte,
the spider, and Wilbur the pig,
this is what she says to Wilbur when they first meet. Charlotte says,
salutations. And even Wilbur, who's a pig said, Charlotte,
what the hell are you talking about? What does that word mean?
And she had to explain to Wilbur that it is a fancy greeting,
a way of saying hello. So when you meet somebody, instead of saying salutations,
just say hi, hello, nice to meet you.
There are so many different ways to greet somebody and you don't need to use
salutations.
Then there's frolic and what this word means is just to play in a lively and
cheerful way. A very carefree way.
Often think it's more appropriate when describing children there.
They're frolicking on the beach or out in the field or on the playground.
They're just playing in a lively manner. Now,
this is another word that I think you're more likely to read in a book than you
would hear being spoken on the street.
However it is a word that hasn't completely disappeared.
You will hear people say this from time to time.
You may hear it in a movie or a TV show,
but I think its usage has declined significantly in the last hundred years.
Another useful resource is word and phrase.info.
So we can just go to the frequency list and put in the word frolic and it tells
us how often this word is used in different styles of writing as well as in
spoken English because they use transcripts as well as interviews and as you can
see it is a word that you will more likely read than than here in spoken
English.
I always think it's good to check and see what the trend is like as well.
So we can go down here and see that frolic is on the decline.
We can also look up salutation and it is a word that you are much more likely to
read than here because it's not that common in spoken English.
Another cool little feature about this site is that if we go down here,
it will actually show you how the word is used in context.
We can also check out the trend and you can see that salutation is becoming less
and less common. Here are a couple more words for you.
Then we have whippersnappers.
Now this may be a word that you've never heard of before and yeah,
it's just not commonly used,
but a Wipper snapper is a person and it's talking about a young person who is
maybe a bit arrogant, over confident, presumptuous,
and an older person might refer to them as a wiper snapper and they'd often use
it with the word young and say that, oh,
this person is just a young whippersnapper.
They don't know what they're talking about. These young whippersnappers.
Finally and I, I'm going to catch a lot of heat for this word,
but I'm going to put it on the list anyway. And that is so,
so now this is a word that's actually become more popular over the years.
But the reason that I'm putting it on there is because English learners tend to
overuse the word. So. So I imagine that most of you know what it means.
It just means that that something is okay,
that you really don't have a positive or negative feeling one way or the other
things are just so.
So now the reason I say that English learners tend to overuse it is because I
often hear them use it to describe themselves, to describe their feeling like,
oh, you know, how are you doing? And they'd say, well, you know, I'm so,
so in this case, I think it's more common for somebody to say, you know,
I'm okay, I'm good, I'm not bad.
If you don't really want to convey a really positive or negative feeling,
you wouldn't really say that that inside you're feeling so. So it's a,
it sounds a little awkward.
You may use this word if you're describing the way you feel about something
else. So for example, maybe I were to ask you a, well, you know,
what did you think of the movie? And you didn't really love it.
You didn't really hate it. You could say, yeah, you know the movie. Well,
you know, it's just so, so, so keep that in mind.
If you're going to use this word,
try to use it when you're describing something else,
like a meal or an event and you don't have a good feeling about it or a bad
feeling, you're just going to say, man, you know, it was so, so, but still,
I'm going to keep it up there and try to discourage you a little bit from using
sozo because it's not a, it's not a descriptive word.
I always encourage learners to try to be more when they want to convey their
feelings. And so, so yeah, just,
it just doesn't give a lot of lot of information.
And personally I feel when somebody says it to me, I get the feeling like, okay,
this person just, they just don't want to talk to me about this thing.
They don't want to describe the way they feel about it. So okay,
we won't talk about it. And that's probably not what you want to do.
You want to practice your speaking skills and find ways to engage in
conversation, not shut it down. So try to use a more descriptive word than Sosa.
Finally, and I've saved the best for less is Google's end. Graham viewer.
Now in Graham viewer attracts the frequency of words and phrases in books over
the last 200 years.
And the best thing about this resource is that you can type in more than one
word or phrase and see how they compare with each other.
So let's take a look at whippersnappers. Now as you can see,
it really took off in the first half of the 19 hundreds but then it went down
significantly before leveling off and as for so,
so it has been on a steady climb these past 200 years.
And I know you're looking at Soso thinking, okay,
I can't wait to go out and use this,
but still I would encourage you to use more descriptive words and we can also
compare Soso and whippersnappers. And when you put both of them in there,
you can kind of get an idea how much more commonly used one word is over the
other.
So I hope you learned something today about those words and I hope you can use
those resources to help you better understand which words and phrases are
commonly used in English. If you enjoyed this lesson,
then I want you to hit the like button and write the word frolic in the
comments. It's lively, it's fun, it's carefree.
If you thought the lesson was okay, I want you to hit the like button and right,
so, so, all right. It's just, you know,
that's the way you felt about it wasn't good, wasn't bad.
If you didn't really care for the lesson,
I want you to hit the like button and write the word whippersnappers in the
comments because then yes, I'm just a young whippersnapper.
A bit presumptuous telling you which words you can no longer use in English
either way. Right. To me in the comments.