Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 6; October 1999
Pressure of work makes it impossible for Mike to write his column this month and what follows is a snippet from a morning's work that Mike did with a teacher training group in Canterbury in June 1999. He was introducing this group of teachers to ways that corpora can help them in their daily work.
He asked us to think what we thought the differences between these three words are:
- lazy
- indolent
- idle
We hazarded our guesses.
He then offered us the l998 New Oxford Dictionary of English definitions:
lazy/…/adjective.. unwilling to work or use energy : I'm very lazy by nature / he was too lazy to cook
indolent /…/ adjective … 1 ( of a person) wanting to avoid activity or exertion; lazy
idle/…/ adjective …1 ( of a person )avoiding work, lazy..
As he pointed out, these definitions present the three words as virtually synonymous. Is that your feeling about them? Is the dictionary doing its job adequately?
He then offered us the following selected chunk of corpus data:
producers have grown fat, lazy and unimaginative.” Davis
CID officers who are lazy and incompetent were so primaril
mean, Micheal was extremely lazy anyway. The best way to do it i
the superb weather and the lazy carefree atmosphere which perv
. By day it's relaxed with lazy days spent on the beach, sittin
ong or if he was just being lazy I put on his headcollar and tr
ople. The Scottish aren't lazy like the English. I don't care
scovered that he was a very lazy president. He could not be both
else has changed and I'm a lazy so and so I just can't be bother
ast of southern Ibiza whose lazy sun-drenched calm just waits to
heir names. And we're too lazy to do any gardening. You don't
n virtually monopolized by the indolent, affluent charms of the
Indolent and privileged, daughter
Tom, her husband, a charming, indolent and indulgent man, had
ed, the Elves became ever more indolent and luxury loving.
F exhaust, pigeons swirling in indolent flocks around the
853 Pushing himself with indolent grace away from the door,
moved across the room with an indolent, hip-swaying saunter,
In contradistinction to the indolent paupers who sponged off
Nevertheless Dara was no indolent voluptuary: he had an
y. They keep saying the idle and incompetent must be weeded
in 1990. Ghofar, incurably idle at home, has not run since
, so there were no jokes, no idle chit-chat. On with the job.
one that he was a feckless, idle, good-for-nothing layabout
learn that I have not been idle in your absence. But I fear
while they lounged drunk and idle in the bar. Hitler's was
God knows what! Gerry's got idle -itis! As long as it ain't
ision. This sounds like an idle life I know, but these long
sed. Thirty-three bored and idle men from Rathcoole and nearby
ategorised as work-shy, bone-idle or bolshie (You can't e
o I tell you you're a lazy idle scrounger, sir! &equo She
double quick and wake up tha idle young brother of yours, or
Mike's group of teachers worked for 15 minutes on this data and came up with these tentative conclusions, based on the above set of data:
indolent appears in written, rather literary texts. Some of us felt that none of the snippets of text gave off a modern feeling; maybe they came from the 20's to 50's of 20th century.
indolent seems to be mostly used in describing upper and middle class situations.
By contrast idle seems to sometimes be found issuing from middle-class mouths ranting about working class people:
“categorised as work-shy, bone-idle or bolshie…”
“that he was a feckless, idle, good-for-nothing layabout “Idle seems to carry the full weight of Lutheran, North West European puritanism: it seems to be much in the mouths of the “Holier-than-thou “ brigade…Interestingly, most of the utterances above have second or third person reference. Very few of the utterances are first person. I am more likely to use idle when speaking of you, he,she or they, than when referring to myself.
Some of the utterances including idle have an oral twang to them.
Lazy has a very different profile. At least a third of the utterances it occurs in are rather positive ones about holidays, leisure and relaxation. It seems to collocate with words and phrases like carefree, days spent on the beach and sun-drenched.
Mike Rundell had amply demonstrated the inadequacy of the Oxford dictionary definitions. In my view he also brilliantly demonstrated the use of corpora snippets in helping advanced EFL students to achieve better understanding of the class nature of UK speech and writing and of how cultural beliefs are inextricably woven into almost anything that we Brits say to ourselves, that we say to others, or that we write.
Mario Rinvolucri
