Please help me about this sentence
Hi everyone. I have a grammar question relating to a sentence in my Idioms book. The sentence is " One day he came into work looking like death warmed up and so we told him to go away for a few days to recharge his batteries" I don't know if the "looking like death warmed up" part is a restrictive adverbial participle phrase or not. Please help!
I am a Non-NEST (Non-Native English-Speaking Teacher)
If you google it for "restrictive adverbial participle phrase" (using inverted commas), you'll be suprised to find that yours is the only result in the world wide web. ))
Last edited by englishhobby; 11-Jan-2014 at 21:21.
If I were a native speaker of English, I would never shut up. :-)
What does "restrictive adverbial participle phrase" mean to you?Originally Posted by ntmhoang18
Pope of the Dictionary.com Forum
Regarding the idiom, I know it as "death warmed over." Do you know it as "death warmed up"?
I'm not a teacher, but I write for a living. Please don't ask me about 2nd conditionals, but I'm a safe bet for what reads well in (American) English.
The latter form is BrE usage.
Pope of the Dictionary.com Forum
The BrE usage isn't reserved for this idiom. We don't "warm food over", we "warm it up". The opposite is "cool it down".
Remember - if you don't use correct capitalisation, punctuation and spacing, anything you write will be incorrect.
Same in AmE, but neither of us actually warms "death" in any way.
Pope of the Dictionary.com Forum
Right. We warm up everything else (including ourselves - "Brr! Let's go inside and warm up!") but it's "you look like death warmed over" in my experience. I was wondering if it was local to the northeast, or largely US, but now I know it's clearly not British.
I'm not a teacher, but I write for a living. Please don't ask me about 2nd conditionals, but I'm a safe bet for what reads well in (American) English.
Welcome to the forum, ntmhoang.
Your first question proved to be an interesting one, but please note that a better title would have been Looking like death warmed up.
Extract from the Posting Guidelines:
'Thread titles should include all or part of the word/phrase being discussed.'
I'm wondering why you need to find a label such as 'a restrictive adverbial participle phrase' for it.
Last edited by Rover_KE; 12-Jan-2014 at 13:37.
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