NY帰り、はみだし社員の英語お勉強日記

Paper Chase Day (5) Wednesday, December 7

■ discard 処分する、捨てる、廃棄する
1) dis という接頭語を使った言葉はいろいろある
disown, discredit, disappoint, discrepancy

2) Another one is "disrespect," which means treat someone badly.
That's recently been shorten just to "dis." He dissed me so I dumped
him.


■ stuffaholic 物中毒者
3) There's a bunch of examples here. These are very common,
foodaholic, workaholic, chocoholic, shopaholic.

4) There's a lot. I saw couple others, biblioholic, which is
somebody who loves and collects books and infoholic, somebody who, I
guess, can't get enough information.

5) I'm sure more and more words using that ending will be coined,
because it's very easy to form them and it's a kind of idea. Well,
there's almost always someone who overdoes something.


■ pack-rat attitude
6) You can also say the place where that person keeps all their
things is a rat's nest.

7) I think some parents might describe their kids rooms as rat's
nests.

8) その他、ビジネスに関連した言葉で rat が使われるのは、
rat race = し烈な出世競争　
I smell a rat. = 何かおかしい （ねずみの匂いがする）

9) And it also includes the idea not just something strange, but
it's strange because someone has evil intensions.

10) copy cat = 猿真似
Kids often use this word when they're doing something and another
kid comes and does to same thing. It's a scornful word when kids use
it, "Oh, you copy cat."

11) parrot ⇒ おうむ、他人の言葉を真似る人、（動）おうむ返しに言う

12) You probably use it in situations where somebody is saying
something that another person uh already said, but the current
speaker isn't really thinking. They are just repeating what they
heard. They are parroting their boss or they're just parroting what
they heard somewhere else. They either don't really understand it or they don't really mean it.


■ reinvent the wheel 無駄な努力をする
13) I think that the key point of this phrase is the needless. It's
the needlessness of going back to the beginning and inefficiency and
waste of time that's involved. A similar phrase start from
scratch means that you need to go back to the beginning, it's a good
thing.

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14) Please tune in again next time.