Tricky Words in this week‘s OVI

As far as I know (because I haven't been there for a while), cell-phone users in the English-speaking world are familiar with the expression SMS, and probably know that it stands for “short message service”, but in practice they prefer to use the word “text”. This is quite short, and it follows typical English usage by sometimes working as a noun (a text, 39 000 texts) and maybe even more often as a verb (to text somebody, to be texted by somebody). This means that English speakers don't have to use long expressions like “obmedzovanie esemeskovania” at work or “práve mi esemeskovali zo slovenského veľvyslanectva” when they go for lunch in Hungary. They just say “cutting down on texting” or “They just texted me from the Embassy”.

ANDY’S WORDSHOP

There must be quite a lot of USSK employees just now whose offspring (ratolesti) are preparing for the oral round of the Maturita exams. Students ask me which verb tenses they need to use in the English speaking test, and I say they should focus instead on vocabulary, for example learning seven key words (their choice) for each of the 25 topics (okruhy), so that each word represents an idea they can speak about. Then they should revise (learn again) the forms of as many irregular verbs as they can. Finally, when they get the question paper in the exam itself, they should read the tasks really carefully. All I can say now is “Good luck!”