Mark my words!

[sister_luck]

I'm in marking hell again and as always there are a couple of language issues you might be able to help me with. (And no, I'm perfectly fine with ending sentences with prepositions, that's a non-issue for me, most of the time. Call me a sloppy teacher if you will, but I just don't care about this silly rule.)



Again, this is mostly stuff that is not quite idiomatic and I'm not sure how to fix it.

One of my students is very fond of this construction:

...it wasn't that funny evening
...it wasn't that good idea

Now I know that this does not work - it's probably easiest to tell him to switch the sentence around: the evening/idea wasn't that funny/good, but what about that good of an idea - is that possible, too?

Could you say that one hears muffled music?

Reflexive pronoun issues

I'm not sure whether the reflexive pronoun is just plain wrong here or whether it's just an added extra:

he doesn't know how he should behave himself
he steals himself out of the window

Looking up words in the dictionary:

One girl was looking for a way of saying Draufgänger in English. She got go-getter. What she actually means is a word for a guy who is fond of the ladies and likes taking risks. Any ideas what might be better?

Someone who keeps drinking lemonade the whole evening while everyone around him gets drunk, could be said to stick to lemonade, right?

Getting close to one another

(Mostly for your amusement, but a better way of saying it would be appreciated though one of them might not need fixing:)

They have each other in arms and dance wild and hot
...she tries to kiss him with her tongue
the girls kiss him left and right of his face

Also, what adjective would you use for a person who is making advances to someone? I know that she becomes obstrustive - which I guess is a misspelling of obtrusive is wrong.

And, how would you fix he is in forbidden love with an English girl?



Thanks in advance - I value and enjoy your input very much!

Comments

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

Thanks for explaining the history of the rule - I was too lazy to write it all down and you put it so much better than I ever could.

[gillo]

I'm glad it made sense!