synonymy neesh it greatly vexes me that my students always try to find translations for english words and phrases. the multiplicitous/manifold synonymy of english is beautiful, and the incredible richness of nuance is utterly lost when you're translating three, four, five english words into one spanish word. take the word thin, for example. you can be slim, slender, slight, svelte, gangly, stick-like, emaciated, skinny, bony, lean, lithe, scrawny, wan, willowy, wizened, gaunt, ethereal, and that's just off the top of my head. pick up a thesaurus and you find attenuated, cadaverous, fine, fragile, haggard, lanky, meagre, narrow, peaked, pinched, rarefied, reedy, rickety, scraggy, shrivelled, skeletal, slinky, small, spare, spindly, starved, sylphlike, twiggy, twig-like, undernourished, underweight, wasted and some... i daresay there aren't that many synonyms in spanish, and i daresay even if there were, they couldn't possibly perfectly match up in implication and texture to the english words. i intend to prove this to my upper intermediates next lesson (as well as hitting them with all the false friends i can find, because i'm sick of them saying "it's the same in spanish" when i know it's not because i know it's a false friend in french; granted many words are cognates, and it's fine to use them if they match up exactly, but given the predisposition of language to pick up subtle connotations, i strongly distrust this.) (i'm not normally mean to my students, i'm just generally pissed with work at the moment and going to take it out on them by making a point of their fallacious learning methods. if you want to learn by translation, don't come to a communicative school.) 050930 what's it to you? who go blather from