Sometimes when I produce material for this blog, I may stray from topics that are directly relevant in legal or business writing. This is one such contribution. I believe that there are issues which it’s worth covering even if the scope is limited for applying them in a professional context, even more so in the case of a word which all non-native speakers know well but which they rarely employ with all the richness it can convey or using all possible derivatives. That word, of course, is fuck: a taboo word and thus inevitably avoided when speaking or referring to clients and colleagues, but frequently heard in some settings in everyday speech. I don’t claim that I will give a comprehensive overview of all possibilities, but I at least hope to offer a hint of its versatility and of the many derivative expressions.
15 January 2014
Consulting your advisers and advising your consultants
I’ve noticed in Russia that professional services firms often like to describe themselves as consultants rather than advisers. This is also quite common in the UK and, I think, the US, but it’s worth examining the verbs to consult and to advise, because they often seem to be used wrongly by Russian speakers.
Principal meanings and principles of usage
English contains many homophones: words which are pronounced the same but mean different things. One pair of spellings that I’ve seen a couple of Russian speakers make mistakes with recently is principal and principle, so let’s look at the variety of meanings they have.
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