English Speaking Skills:  Finally! An Awesome Way to Find Excellent Colloquial Phrases

How to make your English speech – spoken or written—more interesting?

It’ s easy: Use current colloquial phrases.

The problem is knowing which ones to use.  Books are written in every decade of the last half-century about colloquialisms and what they mean and often their history.  However, huge numbers of those are not currently used.

What’s the good of a colloquialism if no one understands what it means.

Voila, here it is, the solution to the problem of where to find current colloquial expressions and words and turns of phrase to spice or enliven your English communication.

I have found awesome colloquialisms in newspapers, in all the sections, and especially in the sports pages of moderately large and large American newspapers (for example “The Denver Post,”  “Boulder Daily Camera,” “Miami Herald,” “Washington Post,” “New York Times”).

Upon examining other all the sections of the above-named newspapers, I found written there excellent colloquial phrases.

But in truth, my favorite colloquial words and phrases have been in the sports page.  They are more prolific there.  These colloquial phrases and words are ones spoken by sports figures – players, coaches, important staff.  And these words and phrases were deemed to be exactly right to catch peoples’/readers’ attention by the writers of the articles. (BTW, I believe some of the best on-staff writers at newspapers are sports writers.   Sports sections are often the most popular sections of paper and online newspapers.)

Here are some examples of colloquial phrases and words found just this week in the Sports Section of “The Denver Post”:

• Back on Top (In other words, the team is now ranked number one or best team)
• Magic man makes it all happen (In other words, a very talented person’s actions wins the game)
• “Just my gut told me to turn it over to Peyton… It’s going to take everyone.” (In other words, my instincts told me to have Peyton come in to play the game. To win is going to take the contribution of every person on our team)
• …. and made sense of a day that tip-toed toward chaos (In other words, the actions happening on that day seemed to be moving toward random actions/chaos which means big failure or losing the game)
• Manning did so, producing another indelible memory and a victory (“indelible memory” or in other words, an action that was so spectacular that every person who saw or even read about it would remember it forever)

Why do people love colloquial phrases?  Because they say in a few short phrases with concrete and memorable imagery what conventional language takes double or triple the number of words to communicate. (Notice that last sentence is 26 words in length… scandalous, or in other words, not good, not at all good because of too many words!)

Get a good colloquial phrase and you will sweeten the day!

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Rerun from Jan 6, 2016