Keeping up our animal theme from yesterday, I saw a funny article about a drunk badger on reuters.com. I already knew that elephants and monkeys got drunk on fermented fruit sometimes but I didn’t know that badgers did it, too.
‘Badger’ is an interesting piece of vocabulary because it is an animal that is common in many parts of the world but is not often in the textbooks or vocabulary lists used in English classes. I think the picture in the article makes it clear what a badger is.
In the first paragraph, the author uses the phrase:
it staggered into the middle of a road and refused to budge.
By this, he means that the badger would not move from the middle of the road. ‘To stagger’ is also a good way to describe how people walk if they are very drunk.
The next interesting word is ‘nocturnal’. We use it to describe animals that are active during the night. The opposite is ‘diurnal’ and we can use ‘crepuscular’ for animals that are mainly active at dusk and dawn.
The last piece of vocabulary I would like to look at is in the final paragraph:
Having failed to scare the animal away, officers eventually chased it from the road with a broom.
A broom is something we have all seen but a word that lot of English learners don’t know. We can use a broom to sweep the house but I think it’s more fun to use one to fly, like Harry Potter!