Getting in the Act

I just love collocations! Don’t know what they are? Not to worry, most people don’t. They are hiding in plain sight everywhere you meet a native English speaker, but not even the native speaker knows they’re using them!

A collocation is a group of words that always goes together. For example, ‘happy,’ ‘glad’ and ‘merry’ are all synonyms but when someone is celebrating the day they were born, we always say ‘happy birthday,’ never ’glad birthday’ or ‘merry birthday.’ ‘Happy birthday’ is a collocation.

Today I wanted to share a few collocations with you. The theme for this group is that they all have the word ‘act.’ Let’s take a peek at how the same word can have different meanings depending on what collocation it finds itself in.

Act out

1. To physically demonstrate, charades; We act out our favorite movies at family gatherings.
2. To behave badly in rebellion; The child was acting out of anger at being punished.

Act your age

1. Stop behaving like a child; Oh, come on! Act your age, not your shoe size!

Balancing act

1. Trying to do more than one thing at the same time; Holding down a job and taking care of the family is a real balancing act.

Caught in the act

1. Interrupted while doing something wrong; My husband tried to hide eating the cookies from me but I caught him in the act.

Clean up your act

1. Improve yourself; I told my son that if he didn’t clean up his act and get a job I would be very disappointed.

Get your act together

1. Get organized and move forward; I finally got my act together and started a blog!

Tough act to follow

1. An excellent performance; Wow, her presentation was really good! That’s going to be a tough act to follow!

You can see how ‘act’ can be a noun (balancing act) or a verb (act out) and can also be positive (tough act to follow) or negative (caught in the act). But regardless of it’s function or meaning, these particular groups of words each paint a picture. In other words, they are metaphors.

I do believe that this is one of the things that make English such an interesting language to communicate in. I also know that it’s English’s abstract nature that makes fluency such a challenge for many EFL/ESL (English as a Foreign/Second Language) learners. Do not be discouraged!

To get some practice with them you could browse through forums like Wordreference or join my Daily Training Program and receive a short list of collocations to practice with every day. If you’re interested in knowing more about that, just click this button:

All the world's a stage ... act on it!

Jennifer