| Hi, everybody! |
| Welcome back to Ask Alisha, the weekly series where you ask me questions and I answer them, maybe. |
| Okay, let’s get to your first question this week. |
| First question this week comes from Brinto. |
| Hi, Brinto! |
| Brinto says… |
| Can you please tell me the difference between “change,” “exchange,” and “interchange.” |
| Sure, let’s talk about it. Let’s start by talking about “change.” |
| We can use change in probably the most situations out of these three words when we want to alter something. So, we want to make a different kind of something or we want to use a different type of something, we can use change to describe that. |
| So, if you want to make a...maybe slight alteration, which is a noun that you can use to describe a change as well, if you want to do something in a document, for example, you want to write new sentence in a document or you want to remove a sentence in a document, you would describe that as a change, as a noun, or if you want to use a verb in this case, you could say, “I changed the document.” That means you altered it or you made it different in some way. |
| The key with “change” is that you are making something different in some way or you’re adding something new, you’re removing something that wasn’t there. Some common expressions you might hear “change” used in are, for example, like “To change the baby” which means to change the diaper on the baby, to put a new diaper on a baby. Or as we talked about earlier, “To make a change in a document,” can also be described as changing a document. |
| So, adding or removing something, to make something different, that’s what we use change to talk about. |
| Let’s move along to “exchange.” |
| “To exchange” means to, usually, have two things that you want to swap. So we use this a lot when we are shopping. For example, if you go to a store and you buy a shirt that’s small, but you needed a shirt that’s a medium and you realized it after you got home, you might come back to the store and ask to exchange the shirt for a different size. That means you have two things that are the same or very, very similar and you want to swap them, so we use “exchange” to talk about this, like “I exchanged my shirts at the store yesterday.” |
| To use another example, you could talk about maybe exchanging money at a currency exchange stand. So, when you want to transfer money from, for example, US dollars to Euros, you would ask for a currency exchange, or in other words, to swap money in this way. |
| So, when you use “exchange,” you are switching. You can think of switching or swapping one thing for another thing. Okay. |
| Finally, let’s go to “interchange,” interchange. |
| I use the word interchangeably or you can use them interchangeably a lot on this channel. That means that you can replace something with something else, like it’s okay to use that thing or this thing in this place. So, to use something interchangeably means that you can use one or two or maybe three or more things in exactly the same way or in exactly the same position. |
| So this is different from “exchange” which refers to some kind of transaction, usually. “Interchange” doesn’t have this feeling. It’s like saying you can use anything in this place or you can use anything in this way. “Exchange” doesn’t have this feeling about it. It just kind of refers to switching or swapping two things that are similar or roughly equal. |
| So, I hope that this helps you understand the differences between “change, exchange, and interchange.” Thanks very much for the question. |
| Okay, let’s move on to your next question. |
| Next question comes from Nihan. |
| Hello, Nihan! |
| Nihan says.. |
| Hi, Alisha! I got a question. Is there an adjective in English meaning that you won't talk to anyone because you're sulking, but it’s temporary because another person did something wrong to you and it’s not that you often sulk as a personal quality? |
| Yeah, this is an interesting question. We might not use an adjective in this case. If I had to choose an adjective specifically, I might describe this feeling as gloomy, like you feel gloomy because someone else did something to you or something happened and your mood is low. You might say, “I’m gloomy” or you might say, “I’m feeling dejected” or maybe, if it’s really serious, despondent, like you don’t want to talk to somebody and it’s very, very serious. |
| What we might say, instead of using a specific adjective in this case, if you are actively not talking to someone because you’re upset with that one, we might instead say we’re giving someone the silent treatment, which means you are not talking to someone because they did something wrong or because there’s some kind of problem. So, we often say that that’s a kind of punishment, like not talking to someone is a kind of punishment. So we might use that kind of expression in this case, like, “Ah, I’m giving him the silent treatment. He made a huge mistake and I don’t wanna talk to him right now.” So, we could use something like that to express that kind of feeling. You feel upset, you don’t wanna talk to someone, you are giving them the silent treatment. |
| I hope that this helps you. I hope this kind of communicates the idea that you were expressing in your question. Thanks for an interesting topic. |
| Okay, let’s move on to our next question. |
| Next question comes from Gerardo Vega. |
| Hello, Gerardo! |
| Gerardo says... |
| Hello, Alisha! I'd like to know what’s the difference between “stare” and “look at.” Thank you very much. |
| Sure! Okay, let’s cover “look at” first. |
| We use “look at” to refer to moving our eyes to something. So we focus our attention on something when we use “look at.” Like “look at the camera” means use your eyes to focus on the camera. So, we use our eyes in a direction when we look at something. “Look at that.” “Look at him.” “Look at her.” Right? |
| But “stare,” to stare at something means yes to use your eyes to focus on that, but it means you don’t move your focus. So, for example, if you see something interesting or maybe you see like an attractive person or you see something you really wanna eat, whatever it might be for you, if you look at something for a very long time and you don’t look at anything else, you can describe that as staring at something. So, for example, “A pretty girl crossed the street and he stared at her for 10 seconds straight.” So, that means someone focused their attention on another person, 100% focused their attention on another person for 10 seconds straight. |
| So, “stare” means a long period of focused attention. To “look at” does not have this feel. We just use our eyes to focus and to take in images. So, this is the difference between “look at” and “stare.” I hope that this helps you. Thanks for the question. |
| Okay. Let’s move on to our next question. |
| Next question comes from Achchu. I hope I said that right. |
| Achchu says... |
| White House “staffer” has tested positive for COVID 19 on CNN, and White House “staff” has tested positive for COVID 19 on BBC. In our country, we use “staff” commonly, but “staffer” is new to me. Is this an American lingo? What’s the difference between them?" |
| Great question! Yeah! So, “staff” generally is used to talk about a group of people, right? The people who work at a company or an organization. We’re talking about everybody there, all of the employees, all of the members, we say that’s the company’s staff. Those are the people that work there or they belong to the organization. So we understand staff as a group of people, right? |
| However, you may, in some cases, see the word “staffer,” staffer. |
| We tend to see this more, I feel, in like government organizations or maybe more official organizations. “Staffer” refers to one person only, one person only. So in this case, as with the news reports, a staffer got a disease, in this case. But we want to use “staffer” here to refer to one person only in this new report. |
| So, this might be a decision, it might be a decision that’s determined by the reporting agency. Different reporting agencies might follow different rules for if they choose to use staff or maybe employee or staffer, but this is what it means. Staffer refers to just one person. Staff refers to a group of people, generally, so I hope that this helps you understand the difference. Thanks for an interesting question. |
| Okay, let’s move on to your next question. |
| Next question comes from Oneralon, Oneralon. I hope I said your name right. |
| Oneralon says... |
| Hi, Alisha and the team! Thanks for your great work, it's amazing. |
| Awesome! Thank you. |
| Sometimes, I receive short messages from native speakers without a personal pronoun, like “Got it.” As far as I know, this is okay in Spanish or Russian languages, but can I do this in short sentences in non-formal verbal speech only, or should I avoid it? |
| Mm, good question! So, when you get messages like this like “got it” or “understood,” those kinds of things, it’s totally normal, it’s totally natural to use those kinds of expressions in quick messages, typically with your friends, with your co-workers, your colleagues. If you’re close to somebody, it’s generally understood that it’s okay to drop that. You don’t have to say “I got it” or “I understood.” It’s fine to just say “Understood” or “Got it.” |
| If, however, you don’t have such a close relationship with someone, if you are talking to a client for the first time or you’re exchanging emails with a teacher for the first time or you’re making a new connection, it’s better to write full sentences. I would recommend that you don’t use this kind of casual expressions until you know someone and you’ve developed a little bit of a relationship with them. But then, absolutely, it’s completely fine to use these short messages just to show you’ve received something or you saw something or you understood some information. So yeah, “Got it!” or “Understood!” or even just “Great!” Something like that, those are perfectly fine to use and they’re very effective ways to communicate as well. So, I hope that this helps you. Thanks very much for the question. |
| All right! That is everything for this week. Thank you very much, as always, for sending your interesting questions. Thanks very much for watching this episode of Ask Alisha and I will see you again next week. Bye! |
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