Monday 26 November 2012

A fast overview?

Today's guest blogger is me - something I added to the TESconnect resource bank a while ago. As it's the most popular there, by quite a margin, I thought I'd dust it down and give it another airing. ('Popular' is a moveable feast; this resource has been viewed most often  but downloaded less frequently than several others.)

[soapbox]
On which subject, why is ELT such a poor relation as far as TESconnect is concerned? You can't teach ELT to someone unless they're over 16 (given the choices offered by their categorization), and good luck searching for anything unless it's related to schools (the non-language sort).
[/soapbox]

Fast vs quick in the sense speedy or rapid

Fast

with a noun:
Fast car
Fast relief
Fast train
Fast connection (during a journey of several stages – e.g. train/bus/plane, or
train/train)
Fast food
idiomatic phrases:
Make fast time (more often “make good time”)
Fast and furious [or alliterative phrases see a later blog]
as modifier for adjective:
            Fast-acting
            Fast-track (originally of a train on an express line, often used figuratively: “The
course lasts 3 years, but there is a fast-track programme lasting only 18 months involving extra home study and online seminars.” A further extension to this use is the verb to fast-track: “We normally recruit at grade 00, but graduate entrants are fast-tracked and start at grade 01.”

Quick

a noun:
Quick change
Quick recipe
Quick recap
Quick summary
Quick introduction
Quick look
Quick overview
Quick worker (typically in a social or sexual context – someone who isn’t
reticent)
idiomatic phrases/expressions:
in [double-]quick time
quick and easy
quick and dirty  (used often in the IT world, referring to inelegant programming
            that gets a job done: “If we do it properly, it’ll take a month; but I can
knock together something quick and dirty in a week.”
            It was quite quick
            Be quick [about it]
            Come quick (some would argue that this is  a lazy abbreviation of “Come
quickly”, but I disagree; I think it’s a perfectly correct abbreviation
of  “Come [here and be] quick [about it]” [Another justification is just 
that it's a bare adverb. Anyway, it's perfectly grammatical]
            to give something a quick wipe/glance/etc.       
as modifier for adjective:
            Quick-acting
            Quick-fire (originally of repeating guns, but often used figuratively – in, say, quiz
shows: “Now it’s time for the quick-fire round, so fingers on buzzers – the
first team with the correct answer gets a point,”
            Quick-drying glue/cement/paint (But, “Have you tried this new quick-drying
                        paint? It dries really fast” – where “really fast” is less informal than “real
                        quick” [and I don’t think I’ve heard “really quick” in this context])

That's all for today. I compiled this on the train home from a class in Oxford (no WiFi) - so I haven't yet given it the corpus treatment; which I should do. Another day, perhaps...





 Mammon (When Vowels Get Together V4.0: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs – AA-AU, EA-EU, and  IA-IU, and – new for V4.0 – OA-OU.  If you buy it, contact  @WVGTbook on Twitter and I'll alert you to free downloads of the forthcoming volumes; or click the Following button at the foot of this page.)
And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources: nearly 32,400 views**,  and  4,400 downloads to date. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with 1570 views/700 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.
 

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