And the Oscar goes to…

We’ve been counting down the hours till the celebrities hit the red carpet, and we finally have the list of the lucky winners. The Oscars ceremony is over, and this marks the ending of the film award season. Oscars fans will have to wait a whole year for the celebration to come again, but in the meanwhile, and to make the waiting experience a bit less distressing, we can delight ourselves with the best acceptance speeches and quotes from the red carpet and backstage.

For a start, let’s have a look at Ben Affleck words.

In his guise as producer, Affleck accepted the best picture awards for Argo. He used the speech to look back to 1998, when he and Matt Damon won the best screenplay award for Good Will Hunting, and to his rocky Hollywood career in the intervening years.

“I was here 15 years ago and I had no idea what I was doing, stood out here in front of you all, I was just a kid. I never thought I’d be back.”

“So many people extended themselves to me and I want to thank them. You can’t hold grudges, it’s hard, but you can’t hold grudges.”

“It doesn’t matter how you get knocked down in life. All that matters is that you get up,” he said, choking back tears.

Your coffee, your way

Today we tackle coffee lovers’ worst nightmare: ordering your coffee when you’re abroad. It might seem a mere mundane matter, but don’t let appearances fool you. We all want our coffee our way. So how do you order a coffee in English?

First and foremost, you need to let the waiter /barista know you want a coffee. Here you have some suggestions:

• Can/Could I have a coffee, please?
• I’d like a coffee, please.
• Just a coffee, please.
• Hi, a coffee please.

If you simply ask for a coffee, the barista will probably start grilling you with quickfire questions about the coffee blend, size, temperature, milk, sugar, syrup, shots, extras… but fear not. Ordering your coffee will be smooth sailing thanks to our tips.

The Geek vs Nerd debate

One difficult thing about learning languages is translating. It may seem easy to translate everything when you’re a beginner, but at some point you start finding lots of terms with subtle shades of meaning and therefore without a straightforward correspondence. Why? Because language is culture, and culture doesn’t usually give names to unknown things in its surroundings – or not known yet.

So when people ask us: “How do you say ‘geek‘ /giːk/ in Spanish?“, the answer is “We don’t have a word for that“, so we: a) simply use the word ‘geek’; b) try to make up a fairly close synonym (maybe ‘friki‘ /ˈfrɪk.ɪ/?); or c) just explain what we’re talking about.

If you decide to employ ‘geek’ as it is, it doesn’t clear up the mystery of the meaning. If you go for the second option, the problem gets even bigger when you use that same Spanish synonym for another word in English: ‘nerd‘ /nɜːd/. So today we’ve decided to go for the third option and shed some light on the geek vs nerd debate. The following infographic by MastersInIt.org will give us a hand.