Can You Define These Tricky Vocabulary Words?

English can be tough, but what part of grammar is the most confusing?

This poll is part of a series that Grammarly is running aimed at better understanding how the public feels about writing, language learning, and grammar.

Please take the poll and share your thoughts in the comments. We can’t wait to hear from you!

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“Barking up the wrong tree” and Other Funny Idioms

Have you heard the expression “barking up the wrong tree?” According to North Carolina State University, there are 23,000 different kinds of trees. What type of tree is incorrect? Idioms can be puzzling, but perhaps less so when you learn more about the phrases. Let’s delve into six interesting idiomatic expressions.

Barking up the wrong tree

Hunters sometimes use scent hounds to locate and pursue animals. When the dogs trap, catch, or even kill an animal, they bark to alert their masters. Certain quarry, such as squirrels and raccoons, climb trees to escape. Occasionally, dogs lose the scent or become confused by an old scent trail. The animal is long gone, but the mistaken dogs circle a tree where they believe it to be hiding and sound the alarm. The fruitless barking of the dogs represents pursuing a mistaken or misguided course.

Brenda thinks she’s going to make money on that shady investment scheme, but she’s barking up the wrong tree!

Sick as a dog

Speaking of scent hounds, was it a touch of congestion that befouled their hunting expedition? Why are dogs associated with illness in the phrase “as sick as a dog?” Canines don’t get sick more often or with more severity than other animals. Disappointingly, the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs reports only that the first recorded mention of the simile was in 1705 and adds, “why a dog should be viewed as particularly sick remains unclear.”

After cleaning Fido’s vomit from the carpet, I was the one who felt as sick as a dog.

Smell a rat

A rat is a slang term for an untrustworthy person. If you “smell a rat,” you suspect something is wrong or that a person has been disloyal. Skunks are famously stinky, but live rats aren’t heavily malodorous. However, many homeowners have located dead rodents in the walls or floors of their homes by following a stench.

The uniformed man claimed to be a home inspector, but I smelled a rat.

Curiosity killed the cat

In Ben Jonson’s play, Every Man in His Humour, the phrase “care will kill a cat” appears. Care (as in worry), not curiosity, is the supposed source of danger in this earlier expression from the 1500s. In 1909, O. Henry was the first to use “curiosity killed the cat.” Nowadays, you would say it to warn someone not to meddle in an affair that doesn’t concern them or to explain why adverse consequences result from being overly inquisitive.

The cops arrested George because he was snooping around the scene of the crime. Curiosity killed the cat!

Don’t count your chickens before they hatch

Despite a mother hen’s best efforts, there are predators—even curious cats—that would devour a tasty egg. Temperature changes and other factors can also affect an embryo, so you can’t be sure of an egg’s viability until it hatches. Written around the sixth century BC, the story collection known as Aesop’s Fables included the tale of a milkmaid carrying milk on her head. She fantasizes about selling butter and cream to buy eggs. The dream of hatching and selling the chickens is so real that she tosses her hair in anticipation of the young admirers who will check out her newly purchased dresses. She drops the milk, illustrating that you can’t ascertain the result of a hypothetical situation in advance.

I am expecting a raise this quarter, but I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch.

Every cloud has a silver lining

“There does a sable cloud / Turn forth her silver lining on the night, / And casts a gleam over this tufted grove.” In the 1600s, John Milton penned these words in Comus: A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle. Captivated with the pretty verse, many writers wrote about “Milton’s clouds” with silver linings. In time, people applied the idea to dark situations in life. In time, you often find that something good can follow unpleasant circumstances.

Ramona’s grandmother congratulated her on how much she improved her reading the summer that she broke her leg: “See! Every cloud has a silver lining.”

If you try to find literal meaning in idioms, you can end up as disappointed as dogs baying at the bottom of an empty tree. Many idioms, like the ones above, have fascinating origins. What expressions would you like to research next?

Does the U.S. need to invest more in English education?

This poll is part of a series that Grammarly is running aimed at better understanding how the public feels about writing, language learning, and grammar.

Please take the poll and share your thoughts in the comments. We can’t wait to hear from you!

If you are interested in more, check out last week’s poll.

All the Sports Words Only Americans Use

To many Americans, Super Bowl Sunday is synonymous with junk food, cheering, the best new commercials, and possibly the sensation of winning (or losing) a war. People in other countries sometimes wonder if the prize is a very large bowl.

It’s not just the fascination with football that befuddles non-Americans—it’s the very words we use to describe it. That goes for sports-related words in general, especially when we compare certain terms in American English to their British counterparts.

In other words, a Yank may queue for gridiron and go barmy in the stands as if he’s got bugger all to do but watch the match, but lads from Blighty think that’s bollocks. And if you don’t know what that means, we’ve got you covered with this handy list of American sports words and their British equivalents. If you just can’t get enough football (or if you secretly think words are more interesting), this is the list to get you through the sports event of the year.

General Sports Words

Sports vs. Sport That’s right: the language barrier starts with what to call the whole category of athletics. Americans watch sports. British folk watch sport. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

Game vs. Match The Super Bowl is also called “the Big Game.” We can only assume a British championship would be called “the Oversized Match.”

Team vs. Club “My favorite football team is the Raiders,” says an Oaklander. “My football club is the Gunners,” says a Brit rooting for Arsenal (though someone from a rival team might call them “Gooners”). Another British football quirk: many fans call their teams—er, clubs—by nicknames rather than their official titles.

Defense vs. Defence It means the same thing: the opposite of “offense” (or if you’re in the U.K., “offence”). British English just spells some things differently. (Want more British spelling variations? Learn about canceled vs. cancelled, favorite vs. favourite, and other ways our Englishes are different.)

Zero-zero vs. Nil-nil If both teams have good defense, the score might be zero-zero. But if they have good defence (note the British spelling), then the score will be nil-nil.

Shutout vs. Clean Sheet In the U.S., a “shutout” is a game in which one team doesn’t score at all. In the U.K., the goalkeeper (not goalie) is said to “keep a clean sheet” if he’s kept the other team’s score at nil.

Tie vs. Draw It could be zero-zero, nil-nil, or ten-ten (no changes there); if both teams have the same score at the end of the game, that’s called a “tie” for Americans and a “draw” for the British.

Field vs. Pitch The thing you play on, if you’re playing in the U.S., is a field. In the U.K., it’s a pitch—not to be confused by what a baseball pitcher (bowler) throws at a batter (batsman) in the game of baseball (that one’s still baseball, though Brits prefer cricket).

Sideline vs. Touchline Either type of line designates the boundaries of the field. Idiom bonus: if a player is unable to play, you can say “that player has been sidelined.”

Football Words

Soccer vs. Football When Americans hear “football,” we think tackling, touchdowns, oval ball with pointy ends. When Brits (or really, anyone not from the U.S.) hear “football”—sometimes abbreviated to “footy”—they think fancy footwork, goals, round ball. In other words, what Americans call “soccer.” Fancy that.

Pig skin This word has no British equivalent. In American football, it’s what you call the actual ball. If you didn’t know that, “tossing around the pigskin” probably sounds pretty gross.

Gridiron For Americans, a gridiron is the field for football—so called because of the parallel lines marking up the grass. But British folks sometimes use the word “gridiron” to refer to the sport of American football as a whole. It rolls off the tongue nicer than “American football,” after all.

In the Six In soccer, some American commentators say “in the six” to refer to action in the six-yard box—that is, the area immediately around the goal. Not to be confused with…

Pick Six This term is specific to American football—that is, gridiron. It’s what happens when a quarterback throws an interception (or “pick”) and the defensive player throws it back, scoring a touchdown worth six points.

On Frame This is a football Britishism meaning “on target”—for example, a kick straight into the goal would be “on frame.” Americans don’t get it: in the words of one Florida-based soccer blogger, “For me it sounds like hitting the post or the crossbar, I wouldn’t think it was a shot on target.”

Upper 90 vs. Top Corner In soccer, this term refers to the top portion of the goal. American commentators refer to the right angle as the “upper 90” (as in, 90 degrees), and British ones content themselves with describing the general region.

Sporting Equipment

Uniform vs. Kit What you wear to show what team (or club) you’re on.

Cleats vs. Boots (studs) These are what you put on your feet to run in turf. Americans refer to the shoes in general as “cleats,” but the actual cleats are the grippy bits on the sole. The grippy bits in British English: “studs.”

Sneakers vs. Trainers More on footwear: a good running shoe without the studs (or grippy bits) is called a “sneaker” in the U.S.; the British aren’t as big on sneaking, so for them, they’re called “trainers.”

Mouth Guard vs. Gum Shield You’d think that teeth would be more injury-prone. But if you’re in Britain, you protect your gums.

Words for the Fans

Remember this sentence? “A Yank may queue for gridiron and go barmy in the stands as if he’s got bugger all to do but watch the match, but lads from Blighty think that’s bollocks.” Let’s finish translating the Britishisms.

Yank An American. Think “Yankee.”

Queue This is what you stand in while you’re waiting to get into the stadium. Or the bathroom. Or if you want fries and beer (or at a British match, chips and a pint).

Barmy “Crazy.” Not necessarily certifiably insane, just a bit on the loony side.

Bugger All This translates to “nothing at all,” but be careful where you say it: it’s a bit vulgar as a phrase. You’re probably ok saying it on the soccer pitch, though.

Lads Let’s not stereotype: there are plenty of lasses (or girls) who are just as excited about a good day of sport. But say you’re with a group of fellows. They’d be dudes, guys, or bros in the U.S., but in the U.K., you’d call them “my lads.”

Blighty An affectionate term for England herself. The term showed up as a sign of patriotism and homesickness at the time of Victorian rule in India and grew in popularity in the early twentieth century, with songs like “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty” causing a tear in many a homesick soldier’s eye.

Bollocks “Nonsense!”

A lot of these words might sound like bollocks to American ears, but if you ever find yourself at a footy match in the U.K.—or are trying to explain gridiron to a lad from Blighty—now you’ll know where to start. Let the games begin!

How Gaming Makes You a Better (Yes, Better) Communicator

The stereotype of gamers as abysmal communicators is familiar.

It’s easy to picture an anti-social type sitting alone in his unkempt room with the blinds drawn, swilling energy drinks and grinding levels past dawn. Or worse yet, the kind who racks up kills online while wearing a headset and emitting a nonstop stream of cringeworthy recriminations. There is also that timeworn trope of the dungeon crawlers—those chortling weird-beards in the back room of the comic shop, forever rolling dice of peculiar geometries and blurting shrill inanities about critical fumbles: “This is preposterous!”

Indeed, it is—for gaming has long-since emerged from the basement. More than half of American households are now home to at least one gamer who plays for a few hours a week. As an industry, vidya games have long since eclipsed Hollywood, and with mobile gaming now on track to surpass consoles and PCs, the global gaming market sits on the cusp of $100 billion. And, stereotypes aside, adult female gamers outnumber all those loathsome teenage boys.

Gamers, in fact, are everywhere. They’re running the morning meeting at your office, putting out literal fires in your neighborhood, and researching vital new kinds of medicine. And one thing all these roles have in common—whether it’s analyzing feedback from beta testers or crunching some quick numbers ahead of the guild’s next raid—is communication. In fact, whether you game via a big screen or a pocket-size one—or at a table with no screen at all—gaming might just make you a better communicator, collaborator, and all-around team player.

Project manager by day, dungeon master by night

Many games unite players in pursuit of a shared objective. Maybe it’s the simple, time-honored goal of a first-person shooter like Halo or Call of Duty, e.g., “shoot the opposing team more than they shoot us.” (A noble goal with million-dollar stakes, at times.)

Or maybe the mission is more complex; a group of friends gets together on Friday nights for wine, cheese, and a Dungeons & Dragons adventure involving twenty-sided dice and character sheets for goofy rogues with names like Storm Drayne.

All the same, these endeavors aren’t so different from when the sales team at the office pushes to hit its third-quarter target or when the developers furiously mash out the newest release ahead of next week’s deadline; they all require coordination. The Friday night dungeon master, who may have labored for hours mapping out a campaign that plays to her friends’ strengths and tests their cohesion, might find these same skills come in handy on Monday morning while mapping out the week’s goals for her trusty band of programmers.

Where guilds tend to use voice chat clients during raids and office folks might instead rely on Slack, in either case, unless each member takes on a role that serves the broader purpose of the team and works cooperatively, their effort is bound to struggle.

For a comical illustration of this lesson in freefall, consider the woeful cautionary tale of World of Warcraft’s Leeroy Jenkins, who precipitated an utter massacre by charging in alone while the rest of his crew was still discussing their plan of attack.

This can be equally evident for a five-player team in a game like Defense of the Ancients, where a random server connection might fill your headset with tactical calculations uttered between two teammates in Portuguese, while another’s suggested maneuvers appear on your screen in Cyrillic. Such communication challenges can, to put it mildly, make it difficult to properly time a coordinated strike, or to know who on your team will need backup and when. It can also be just plain stressful—even before whatever semblance you had of a plan starts to crumble, alongside morale.

High spirits lead to high scores

To UK Halo player Abdul Musawwir, keeping morale up is the most essential part of team interaction:

If something bad happens in a game, a team that responds to that calmly and confidently is way more likely to regain control compared to a team that just gets angry or starts blaming each other. Poor morale is going to lead to more mistakes, like mindlessly charging the guy who last killed you. . . . Remain focused, remain positive. Just shake that incident off and move on.

Thus, gaming teaches us the value of communicating clearly and concisely, even in situations that feel dire. Maybe the concern when you’re part of team in Halo is that one of your opponents has managed to take a strategically advantageous perch with a long-range weapon like a sniper rifle. Or maybe you’re on deadline at the office, battling a buggy script while trying to stage a critical post.

Either way, no one likes feeling shouted-at or having to manage other people’s panic. In situations like this, it’s essential to know who you can work with and to state plainly what you know, why it’s important, and how it can be resolved. This tends to be vastly more productive than trying to handle such problems alone or freaking out your teammates or colleagues. In this respect, a question like “Will you take a look at this interactive I’m trying to embed?” has more in common with “Do any of us have a rocket launcher?” than with “Oh God, I have no idea what to do.”

Plus, having rehearsed being assertive and adapting on the fly in pitched combat where warnings are constantly flashing and the terrain around you sometimes explodes, pivoting to an urgent assignment at the office might just feel like a piece of cake.

When communication itself is the game

In some games, communication isn’t just a crucial tool if you want your team to do well; rather, what you tell people is itself part of the game. Players in a roleplaying campaign, for instance, use conversation (and sometimes persuasion) to essentially construct a story around their characters’ shared quest.

Lisa Pickoff-White, a journalist in San Francisco renowned for her tenacity and data-wrangling skills, says figuring out how to effectively steer such a game, even when not everyone’s character shares the same values, tends to yield translatable skills:

I think table topping has allowed me to think through different scenarios quickly and learn to take into account the goals of people in my group and whether they’ll align with the plan. Like is that paladin really going to go for stealing some jewels? How do you motivate them?

While certain games (say, Texas Hold’em) tend to hinge on giving up as little information as possible, other games can at times offer strategic advantages in over-communicating—or appearing to, anyway. One example is Magic: the Gathering, where a typical turn might find one player attacking with a team of creatures—knights, elves, demons, or the occasional mongoose for instance—while the defending player decides how to try to block them with creatures of her own, or perhaps kill them with removal spells.

Here, a crafty player can lead an opponent into traps, perhaps through careful readings of the wordings of the cards—or perhaps by simply seeming to say too much. Gaudenis Vidugiris, who is known among competitive Magic players for his Pro Tour appearances, demonstrated exactly this tactic during the weekend-long slog toward his third Grand Prix victory. Nine rounds into the first day, his exhausted opponent was puzzling over which creatures he needed to block.

Vidugiris, a New Yorker who sometimes plays for the Lithuanian national team, impatiently slid his opponent’s cards into a position suggesting an even exchange that would maintain parity, as if to say “Isn’t your move obvious? I’m a professional and I’m tired of waiting.” His opponent (your humble blogger) obliged. That’s when Vidugiris revealed the Lightning Bolt he’d been masterfully slow-rolling like a titan of poker. Vidugiris—a lawyer by trade—had not, in fact, said too much, but instead communicated exactly the right amount of information to rout his opponent’s defense.

Vocab grab bag (of items)

It’s worth noting that one other way Magic, like many games, can enhance players’ communication is simply by building their vocabulary. There are more than 16,000 unique Magic cards with different names; Magic’s multiverse has many large zombies, but only one Corpulent Corpse, for instance. As a result, a longtime player might recognize the difference between the type of veil you wear and the type of vale you walk through, because the game classifies one as an artifact and the other is a land.

Similar examples can be found in iconic video games from Chrono Trigger (where, should you recruit the dark wizard Magus, you’ll quickly learn the word “scythe”) to Metal Gear Solid 3 (in which, if you find yourself wounded in combat, you’ll come to appreciate the word “styptic”).

Whatever your game of choice might be—and whatever context you find yourself communicating in, professional or otherwise—Grammarly is pleased in help you lead your team to victory and fulfill your quest.

There is no official language of the United States. Should that change?

This poll is part of a series that Grammarly is running aimed at better understanding how the public feels about writing, language learning, and grammar.

Please take the poll and share your thoughts in the comments. We can’t wait to hear from you!

If you are interested in more, check out last week’s poll.