Guinness is Good for You

I was browsing the BBC News archives today and this article caught my eye. I like a beer or two after work on Friday and Guinness is one of my favourite beers.

The first interesting word I noticed in this article is ‘slogan‘ in the first paragraph. A slogan is a short phrase used in an advert. It’s important for slogans to be easy to remember and they are sometimes combined with music to make a ‘jingle‘.

Another interesting thing about slogans is that they are not always grammatically correct. The most famous example of this is the slogan ‘Think Different’ used by Apple. In this case the slogan is deliberately ungrammatical to emphasise that the company is different and doesn’t conform to what is generally accepted in the computer industry.

The next interesting word is ‘dose‘. A ‘dose‘ is the amount of a particular medicine taken at one time. It is mentioned in the next paragraph that:

Drinking lager does not yield the same benefits,

To ‘yield a benefit‘ is a nice, natural collocation but we could also use ‘give’ to mean the same thing.

‘Clot‘ is another word mentioned in a few different forms in this article. When we talk about a ‘blood clot‘, we mean blood that has hardened into solid lump. The verb ‘to clot ‘ is the process of forming a clot.

A very common mistake among English learners is saying ‘drink out’ meaning going out to drink with their friends. We often use the phrasal verb ‘eat out‘ to talk about eating at a restaurant or cafe. However, when talking about drinking in a pub or bar, a native speaker would usually use the phrase ‘to go for a drink‘ or ‘to have a drink’ and not ‘drink out’.

Are you going out tonight? If so, what will you be drinking?

Today’s image is by Michal Zacharzewski.