Business & Informal Telephone Conversations

Week 3^rd- 5^th March

Hi everybody! It’s a nice weekend.

What’s the weather like? It’s warm, nearly hot and sunny! It’s a wonderful spring Sunday, although it is still winter!

Today is the International Women’s Day!

We started the week talking about madness! Why? I ‘m not sure.

Madness is the noun. Adjectives: mad, crazy. More colloquial expressions: to be nuts, to have a screw lose, to be as mad as a hatter. It seems that this expression comes from the hatter’s (people who make hats) job. Hatters used strong chemical products and those made them have hallucinations or act strangely.

And very informally (slang) ,we say that somebody is ‘cuckoo’. And that is the reason why the Spanish translation of ‘Somebody flew over the cuckoo’s nest’ doesn’t refer to the bird but to an institution for the mentally ill!

Don’t confuse sane /insane with healthy/unhealthy. Health refers to the physical state and sane to the mental state.

We went on (continued) with ‘movies’.

Remember the differences between ‘tell’ and ‘say’.

·         Tell + object pronoun

·         Say that+ S+V

He told me he went to the cinema every weekend.

Elizabeth said that she hated sport.

After that we listened and practised passing on telephone messages.

We use the structure: ‘want somebody to do something’ you can also use ‘ask’ with the same structure and in this case ‘ask’ means pedir, and it’s more polite. And even more polite is ‘would like to’.

·         The director wants the accountant to pay the client.

·         My boss wanted us to pick him up.

·         The engineer would like you to set a new date.

·         Mr. Lang asked the lawyer to sign the contract.

And we finished with a song! A classic! ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You!’

Enjoy the rest of the Sunday.

See you on Tuesday!