Hello everyone!
Please, write some interesting collocations if you have some time. It would help me much because I am preparing to CAE exam.
Thanks in advance
Of course if I find out a new one, I’ll also write it down here:)
Take care!
That’s a good idea 
Here is my fair share of collocations:
- to look down one’s nose at somebody means “to be contemptuous or disdainful of”
- to take somebody down a peg means “to do something to show someone that they are not as good as they thought they were”
- second in command means “an assistant with power to act when his superior is absent”
Well, now the ball is in your court 
The tricky collocations are the ones that are not idioms. For example, we never say that something is a “big detriment”, but only a “great detriment”. The opposite is “no great detriment”. Why? I don’t know.
Sometimes an English writing professor will send a foreign student down to me and say that the person “doesn’t know grammar”. When I check the student’s writing, I find that he or she makes virtually no grammar mistakes, but that the appearance of bad grammar actually comes from not knowing collocations.
Maybe because detriment already contains “big” as part of its meaning ?
I.e. detriment is a big damage ?
By the way, could anybody please tell me the difference between slang, collocation and idiom?
Never say never, Jamie:
“If they do get us, many times it’s a big detriment to them for the next game, the next two weeks. They’re up so emotionally. " How much longer will it go on? # There are whispers Cherry Creek has concerns about being thin in the next few years, but a check of its enrollment showed that it has been…” americancorpus.org/
As can “great”.
great adjective: relatively large in size or number or extent; larger than others of its kind (Example: “A great juicy steak”)
an idiom is a slang expression that is known for a long time (like several centuries) It is a time-proved thing, and not all slang evolves into idioms. Some slang expressions are to fall into oblivion.
A collocation is a combination of words that sounds natural and is used in certain situations.
Like Jamie said, “a great detriment” is a collocation. You cannot say “a big detriment”, mainly because it would be a weird thing to say.
How about “a major detriment”?
Yes, you can say that.
Sports page, Molly, sports page.
You’re liable to see or hear anything coming from an athlete or sports writer, because many of them tend to be clumsy with language. My nephew’s favorite was when a college football player on TV said, “My major be speech.”
Thanks for all comments:) that’s my turn to give some examples of collocations:
a mental BLOCK e.g.
I always seem to suffer a MENTAL BLOCK whenever I’m asked a question in class even though most of the time I know the answer.
frame of MIND, e.g.
I don’t think I’m in the right FRAME OF MIND to sit an exam. I don’t seem to be able to concentrate
to step out of LINE, e.g.
She’s a very strict teacher. If any of her students STEP OUT OF LINE she gets really angry.
I hope they’ll be helpful:)
Maybe they prefer other collocations to the ones you use?
Perhaps, but it’s also quite possible that they’re very clumsy with language.
In just a few posts, they’ve jumped from being clumsy with language to very clumsy. What happened?
Do you think that certain collocations are genre/context-specific?
“Adjective + detriment” doesn’t seem that popular in the USA (americancorpus.org/). “Big detriment” shares 5th place with other adj + detriment collocations.
1 SERIOUS DETRIMENT 5
2 MAJOR DETRIMENT 5
3 POLITICAL DETRIMENT 4
4 BIGGEST DETRIMENT 4
5 GREAT DETRIMENT 4
6 SUBSTANTIAL DETRIMENT 3
7 FINANCIAL DETRIMENT 2
8 OBVIOUS DETRIMENT 2
9 GREATEST DETRIMENT 2
10 OVERALL DETRIMENT 2
11 SIGNIFICANT DETRIMENT 2
12 ULTIMATE DETRIMENT 2
13 UTTER DETRIMENT 1
14 UNFORTUNATE DETRIMENT 1
15 TREMENDOUS DETRIMENT 1
16 TRAGIC DETRIMENT 1
17 TANGIBLE DETRIMENT 1
18 SHORT-TERM DETRIMENT 1
19 OPERATIONAL DETRIMENT 1
20 REAL DETRIMENT 1
21 PROFOUND DETRIMENT 1
22 PROFESSIONAL DETRIMENT 1
23 PRIVATE DETRIMENT 1
24 POSSIBLE DETRIMENT 1
25 POSITIVE DETRIMENT 1
26 PHYSICAL DETRIMENT 1
27 PERSONAL DETRIMENT 1
28 PERCEIVED DETRIMENT 1
29 LONG-TERM DETRIMENT 1
30 HUGE DETRIMENT 1
31 GENERAL DETRIMENT 1
32 FURTHER DETRIMENT 1
[color=blue]33 BIG DETRIMENT 1
34 EVERLASTING DETRIMENT 1
…
And, yes, Jamie, that one example per million words is from the sports’ world. Could it be that “big detriment” is a preferred collocation in that area?
Hi,
Here’s another expression: flogging a dead horse.
Alan
An another “Each to his/her/their own”.
Or it could be that they’re clumsy at using English.
How could we find out either way? And, could we also conclude that people who use the other “collocations” in this list are clumsy users?
13 UTTER DETRIMENT 1
14 UNFORTUNATE DETRIMENT 1
15 TREMENDOUS DETRIMENT 1
16 TRAGIC DETRIMENT 1
17 TANGIBLE DETRIMENT 1
18 SHORT-TERM DETRIMENT 1
19 OPERATIONAL DETRIMENT 1
20 REAL DETRIMENT 1
21 PROFOUND DETRIMENT 1
22 PROFESSIONAL DETRIMENT 1
23 PRIVATE DETRIMENT 1
24 POSSIBLE DETRIMENT 1
25 POSITIVE DETRIMENT 1
26 PHYSICAL DETRIMENT 1
27 PERSONAL DETRIMENT 1
28 PERCEIVED DETRIMENT 1
29 LONG-TERM DETRIMENT 1
30 HUGE DETRIMENT 1
31 GENERAL DETRIMENT 1
32 FURTHER DETRIMENT 1
33 BIG DETRIMENT 1
34 EVERLASTING DETRIMENT 1
Well, we could conclude that just one hit doesn’t prove anything.
If we consider that four hits might prove something (which it can’t), we could conclude that since “great detriment” is 300% more likely to occur than “big detriment”, then the latter is deviant usage. However, the sample is too small and native speaker intuition has to come into play.
This is where you consult Google for the exact phrases:
“great detriment” - 83,000
“big detriment” - 4,520 (one of which is in this forum thread)
Corpus samples can lead to some very stupid conclusions. I once saw a corpus-based Oxford dictionary that marked “grape” as occurring relatively infrequently, and therefore not a high-priority word to learn. Any native speaker knows that even if we don’t blabber about grapes several times a day, a person learning English needs to know what a grape is called.