This week I’ve been looking at false friends. These are words that look familiar, but are being used in a different way and so have a different meaning. Or, in the case of archaic language, their meaning has changed over time. In this recent blog post, I talk about false friends we might encounter when reading Shakespeare.
When words form part of a collocation, their meaning often changes. If we are not careful, we may assume that the meaning a word has on its own, or in general usage, will be carried through to the collocation. This is often not the case. Let’s look at some collocations often used in legal and other professional contexts.
The collocation to forgive a debt does not carry the notion of spiritual or religious forgiveness. It simply means that if someone owes us money we cancel the debt. We are not necessarily forgiving them for not paying, but we no longer require them to pay.
Closing a deal means reaching agreement or making a sale. Nothing is actually closed, in the sense that we close a door.
When we address an issue we are not speaking, in the sense of giving an address, and of course this is not related to the idea of a home or office address. We are simply facing a problem or a situation, discussing it or dealing with it.
If we meet the conditions for something we are complying with conditions or requests. There is no sense of ‘meeting up.’
And here is another one like forgiving a debt. If we suffer a loss we may not actually be suffering at all. A company, for example, may suffer a loss because they didn’t make a profit or something went wrong. No-one is in pain; the company simply earned less than its outgoings.
As an English specialist, I really enjoy the way words can be used in different contexts with different meanings. It can make things quite challenging for language learners, however. For this reason, I recommend learning collocations as vocabulary, just as you would with single words, and always checking the meaning of a collocation if you encounter a word that doesn’t seem to fit its context. For example, we wouldn’t really expect to read about forgiveness or suffering in a legal or business document!
If you are interested in learning some of the more complex collocations, this list might help. There are many collocations used in academic contexts, in alphabetical order. Let me know if you find it useful!
