I Want You To Speak English

Synonyms for very:  absolutely, acutely, amply, astonishingly, awfully, certainly, considerably, dearly, decidedly, deeply, eminently, emphatically, exaggeratedly, exceedingly, excessively, extensively, extraordinarily, extremely, greatly, highly, incredibly, indispensably, largely, notably, noticeably, particularly, positively, powerfully, pressingly, pretty, prodigiously, profoundly, remarkably, substantially, superlatively, surpassingly, surprisingly, terribly, truly, uncommonly, unusually, vastly, wonderfully. Ways to avoid using the word 'very':

Photo: Commons Wikimedia Three days from Christmas Eve and I still need to remind myself that Christmas is upon us. The Christmas feeling of excitement  I usually get this time of year has been very slow in arriving this year. I am not sure why. I don’t know whether it’s because I have had my fair share of bereavement in 2015 and don’t feel much like celebrating, or whether I have arrived at the end of the year feeling tired. It certainly took my husband and I a long time to finally decide to decorate our Christmas tree, but I am glad we made the effort. Our home now has a warm, cosy and comforting feeling. I was trying to think what to write in my last post before Christmas that wasn’t  tinged  with sadness, and after much thought, I decided to find out what Christmas means to people. I researched quotes by different people that have been recorded in song, poetry, literature or  hearsay  and picked 10 of my favourite. Some are funny and some are poignant. I’d like to share them here w

Christmas is in the air! Are you ready? It’s time to get into the spirit, but if you’re new to Madrid, you might be a bit lost with Spanish Christmas traditions.  Have no fear! Because today we’re going to talk about eight important holiday traditions to help you celebrate like a real  madrileño.  Some of them might surprise newcomers or first-time visitors… but don’t worry, it’ll be fun!  And now, with less blackface. (See #6) Here goes: 1. They celebrate Black Friday now, and it’s four days long Black Friday’s expansion in the US hasn’t gone unnoticed by savvy Spanish marketers. But in a country that doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, it’s a bit of a mystery why Black Friday is catching on. The other mystery? Why it’s a four or five-day event in many stores!  I assume almost everybody understands enough English at this point to realize that “Friday” is only one day. But Black Friday sales in Madrid can just as easily be all weekend, from Thursday to Sunday or even longer. In any case, b

Worldwide, people are struggling to cope with the deaths of so many innocents in Paris and Beirut ,  which were just two weeks after a downed Russian airline killed hundreds of people. These are just low points in the tests we face as a world in the face of attacks of both terror and military, abuses of power, and the suffering of millions of people around the globe that we don’t hear about and never will. It’s easy to believe that the world is evil and to fear that our race is doomed to end in destruction. However, the laws of nature suggest that people are inherently good, and a small subset of the world’s population makes us all look bad. We see it every day on the news and social media, stories of atrocities that make us feel fear, grief, anger and hopelessness. Those of us who want to fear hope must search for it, then. I recently came across a great speech found near the end of a movie called The Great Dictator ,   which was written, produced, directed scored by

Justin Sullivan/Getty When 23-year-old Brandon headed from Massachusetts to the Bay Area in mid-May to start work as a software engineer at Google, he opted out of settling into an overpriced San Francisco apartment. Instead, he moved into a 128-square-foot truck. The idea started to formulate while Brandon — who asked to withhold his last name and photo to maintain his privacy on campus — was interning at Google last summer and living in the cheapest corporate housing offered: two bedrooms and four people for about $65 a night (roughly $2,000 a month), he told Business Insider. "I realized I was paying an exorbitant amount of money for the apartment I was staying in — and I was almost never home," he says. "It's really hard to justify throwing that kind of money away. You're essentially burning it — you're not putting equity in anything and you're not building it up for a future — and that was really hard for me to reconcile." Brandon Brandon lives