4B READING Glossary

• stomp= walk around angrily, walk very loudly
• full-blown= fully developed (+drama, +argument, +disaster)
• rapt= very interested in what you are watching/listening to
• flip= turn over with a sudden quick movement
• toss= throw lightly
• a hop= a jump
• crested= with a group of feathers standing on their heads
• hover= wait somewhere especially near sb
• for a few beats= for a short time
• die away= disappear little by little
• launched into= started energetically
• a baboon 

Water Planet by Leonardo diCaprio

Elder vs Older/Elder vs Eldest

There are four items: Older, Oldest, Elder and Eldest.

The difference between Older and Oldest, and between Elder and Eldest is obviously that the ones that end in -er are comparatives whereas the forms that end in -est are superlatives. The difference between Older and Elder, and between Oldest and Eldest is not so obvious, but Use of English says that the ones starting with an E- are limited to talking about people and, most commonly, about family members. In contrast, the forms starting with an O- are most generally used:

My elder/older sister lives in that building over there. The building is the oldest/eldest in the area.

Also, the E- forms are used as an adjective before the noun whereas the O- forms are not restricted to a prenominal position. This is a very important difference.

My sister is older/elder than me.

Elder can also be used as a noun; it's a historical term to describe the wise old people of a tribe or settlement:
The village elders discussed the problem.

The other choice is that of deciding whether to say my elder sister or my older sister. In theory, that depends on the number of sisters you have and who you are referring to. If you have just the one sister, you'd refer to her as your elder sister. BUT if you have, let's say, two sisters who are older than you, and you talk about your eldest sister, that would be the one that was born first, your elder sister being the one born between her and yourself. 

I've got two sisters who are older than me. My sister Ana is my eldest sister. My sister Cristina is my elder sister. Ana was born, then Cristina, then me.

You see? That's in theory. In practice, they're pretty much interchangeable when talking about family.
And in any case, most native speakers would talk about "my big sister" (meaning older than me) or "my little brother" (meaning younger than me).

On COLLOCATIONS

Last week we did some class work on word pairs and collocations. Collocations are words that "collocate" together: they usually come as a pair and it is important to learn these word chunks as lexical units as it will make a huge difference to how natural you sound when speaking English. So, whenever you learn a new word in English, try to learn the words that go together with it at the same time. For instance, we Spanish "ponemos la mesa". But do English-speaking people "put the table"? I don't think so! I don't mean that they're lazy and don't do any housework: the problem here is that the collocation is different in English and in Spanish. It would then be advisable to learn the words together "to lay the table" or "to set the table" so as to avoid making this kind of mistake. Try to make a concious effort in the future to make note of these collocations whenever you are learning a new word. Do not learn new words, learn new word chunks! By the way, do you "do an effort" or "make an effort"?

There is a dictionary which is very helpful to become aware of common collocations. It is the OXFORD Dictionary of Collocations, which looks like this:

You can find the online version, which is free, here: 5yiso.appspot.com Look up "effort" and answer my question above, or just re-read this entry to find out.

Along the same lines, there is a series of self-study books by Cambridge for those of you who want to put some extra work into your studies. It's called English Collocations in Use. Units are classified by theme: