This is a vocabulary-building post about feeling angry. I suppose if you’re interpreting at a conference, you’re more likely to hear expressions voicing mild anger or irritation, but in other settings, I can imagine people being furious.
Let’s get started with a game as a warm-up!
Idioms game
This is a word association game. Your task is to use the image as inspiration to help you find an idiom meaning ‘being angry/grumpy’. The idiom usually has 2-5 words, and if it’s a verb phrase (e.g. to fly into a rage), the first word is ‘to’ in the quiz, and the image might be a bird or a set of wings.
Get the idea? š
These idioms are all pretty informal; I wouldn’t recommend using them in a conference settings, unless the speaker is being very casual.
Did you get the answers?
to blow one’s top: I told her what happened, and she blew her top.
to explode: When I told my mum the mark I got in my last Physics test, she exploded.
to lose one’s rag
to see red
foaming at the mouth
to go ballistic
to throw one’s toys out of the pram (= to have a temper tantrum)
to get hot under the collar (this can also mean to be embarrassed)
Idioms – brainstorming
Set a timer for 3 minutes, and see how many more idioms you can come up with meaning ‘to lose one’s temper’!
to blow up
to fly off the handle
to lose the plot
to lose it
to have a hissy fit
to throw a fit
to have a strop
to have/throw a paddy – interestingly, this appears to come from the word Paddy (from Patrick), meaning an Irishman; the idea being that Irishmen were easily riled. Some people find this idiom offensive because of the stereotype, others don’t really recognise the link with Ireland anymore. It’s certainly a British American idiom, rather than American English, and very colloquial.
to be fit to be tied (I was fit to be tied when I heard the news.)
to be hacked off
to go berserk
to fly into a rage
to lose one’s cool
Now let’s see how many adjectives you know to describe people who are bad-tempered. Most of these are British English.
tetchy – a very British word meaning someone who gets irritated easily. May have first been used by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet.
ratty – feeling annoyed (informal)
waspish – someone who makes cutting, cruel comments and sounds annoyed (or the comments themselves can be described as ‘waspish’). Nowadays, in a different register, we would say ‘bitchy’.Ā
querulous – this means someone complaining or fretful (from the Latin queri, to complain) – quite an old-fashioned word
crotchety – this word is used to describe a person who is difficult or cranky. A common phrase would be ‘a crotchety old man’.
snappy
surly – collocates well with ‘teenagers’!!
fractious
cranky
exasperated
Ā
Quiz
What word for ‘furious’ is an adjective that originally meant black and blue, then pale, then red?
What word for ‘angry’ comes from the French (via Latin) meaning ‘to smoke’?
What old fashioned word for an ill-tempered person is an adjective describing one of the ‘humours’ (of which bilious is another)?
What word for ‘furiously angry’ could also be used to describe a light bulb?
What colloquial British English word meaning grumpy could also describe a rodent?
What adjective for ‘angry’ comes from a three-letter noun which is a synonym for ‘anger’?
What British English word for ‘grumpy’ may have been used first by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet in 1592?
What word for bad-tempered comes from the Latin word for ‘break’, ‘shatter’?
What British English word for ‘annoyed’, often used when talking to children, can be represented by this symbol: X ?
livid
fuming – informal
choleric – old-fashioned
incandescent (e.g. incandescent with rage)
ratty – informal
irate
tetchy
fractious
cross
Useful terms for meetings
Not all of the idioms and terms we’ve looked at so far are suitable for meeting situations, where people tend to be relatively diplomatic and avoid expressing very strong emotions. In general, some of the more colloquial idioms may not be formal enough – although it depends very much on the speaker’s style.
Here are some safe options for describing a feeling of irritation, rather than rage:
irritated
displeased
exasperated
put out
dismayed
And some options for saying that you’re very angry:
incensed – this is generally used about other people, rather than oneself, and has a tinge of being offended by someone’s words or actions, taking umbrage, e.g. She was incensed by the implication she hadn’t worked hard enough on the proposal.
furious
incandescent (often ‘incandescent with rage’) – this describes extreme anger
enraged
fuming – quite informal
livid
seething
infuriated (by…)
apopletic – this means ‘furiously angry’, so much so that it looks as if the top of his/her head is going to blow off! It comes from Ancient Greek via Latin, and means ‘to be disabled by a stroke’
beside oneself with rage
outraged
Of course, there are many other words and expressions, some of which are just too colloquial (or vulgar) for a meeting situation, e.g. pissed off.
Improvisation
Write a short letter to complain to a company about the terrible customer service you have received. Give details about what happened. Use several words or idioms that mean ‘angry’ or ‘furious’.
When you’ve finished, take a look at the example text.
I am writing to express my profound disappointment and frustration following my recent experience with your company. As a loyal customer, I am not only dissatisfied but downright infuriated by the treatment I received.
On 1st September, I contacted your customer service team regarding a faulty toaster. After waiting on hold for an excruciating 90 minutes, I finally spoke to a representative who seemed uninterested and dismissive of my concerns. Despite my attempts to explain the issue clearly, I was repeatedly interrupted and given vague answers that provided no resolution.
What has truly left me livid is that after being promised a follow-up within 3 days, I have heard absolutely nothing. I have since called back multiple times, only to encounter more unhelpful staff and endless transfers between departments. This level of incompetence and disregard is unacceptable.
I trusted your company to provide a certain standard of service, and this experience has shattered that trust. It is bewildering and maddening to feel so undervalued as a customer.
I demand an immediate response to this letter, as well as a clear explanation of what went wrong and how you intend to rectify the situation. A gesture of goodwill to address the inconvenience caused would also be appreciated.
Please understand that I am not just annoyedāI am outraged by the lack of professionalism and courtesy shown. If I do not receive a satisfactory resolution within two weeks, I will have no choice but to escalate this matter further.
I hope this letter serves as a wake-up call to improve the way you treat your customers.
Yours sincerely,
Ā
Now:
Rewrite either your text or the example text to make it more informal. Use plenty of appropriate idioms.
Rewrite your text or the example text to make it more formal.
Ā
Hi,
Iām writing because Iām absolutely fuming about how Iāve been treated by your company recently. Honestly, Iām at the end of my tether and feel like Iām talking to a brick wall every time I reach out.
On 3rd September, I contacted your customer service team about a faulty toaster. After waiting on hold for what felt like forever, I finally got through to someone who barely seemed to care about my problem. I tried to explain what was going on, but I kept getting cut off, and the answers I got were completely useless.
What really made my blood boil is that I was told someone would get back to me within 3 days, but here we areānothing. Zilch. Iāve had to chase this up myself, only to be passed around like a hot potato between departments, and still no oneās helped me.
Frankly, Iām spitting feathers about this whole thing. I expected so much better from your company, and this has left a really bad taste in my mouth.
I need this sortedāpronto. I want a proper explanation of whatās gone wrong, what youāre going to do to fix it, and maybe a little something to make up for all the time and stress Iāve had to go through.
If I donāt hear back within 2 weeks, Iāll have to take things further, which is the last thing I want to doābut I will if I have to.
I really hope you take this seriously and start treating your customers properly.
Thanks,
Note how many idioms there are in this version. This supports the idea that idioms are often informal.
Ā
MORE FORMAL
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am writing to formally raise my concerns about the unsatisfactory level of customer service I have recently experienced with your company. I am deeply disappointed and feel compelled to express my dissatisfaction in the hope that appropriate measures will be taken to address this matter.
On 3rd September, I contacted your customer service department regarding a faulty toaster. Despite waiting for an extended period to speak to an agent, the response I received was cursory and lacked the professionalism I had expected. My attempts to explain the nature of the issue were met with minimal engagement, and the advice provided was both vague and unhelpful.
I was assured during this interaction that my concerns would be escalated and that I would receive a resolution within 3 days. Regrettably, no such follow-up has occurred. Instead, I have been required to contact your company multiple times, during which I was transferred between departments without any clear resolution. This process has not only been inefficient but has also caused considerable frustration.
I must express my dismay at the lack of communication and accountability demonstrated throughout this ordeal. It is entirely unacceptable that as a loyal customer, I have been treated in such an unprofessional and dismissive manner.
I respectfully request a detailed explanation of the delays and lack of resolution, along with a prompt and effective solution to my original issue. Furthermore, I expect a gesture of goodwill to compensate for the inconvenience and time lost as a result of this situation.
Please respond to this letter within two weeks with your proposed actions to resolve this matter. Should I not hear back, I will be left with no choice but to escalate my complaint to the relevant consumer protection authorities.
Yours faithfully,
Ā
Note how much milder the formal version is.
Ā
I hope you enjoyed these exercises!
p.s. The wordĀ fractious is a very common term to describe political parties that argue, debates that are ill-tempered, etc.
Here are some examples from The Guardian:
“Thought for the Day” boring? So why does it provoke such fractiousĀ debate?
This is just one instance of the power of drawings, and their role in the oftenĀ fractious relationship between architect and client
Fractious EU summit rejects Franco-German plan for Putin talks
But the EU, fragmented, disputatious and wounded to an extent unusual even by itsĀ fractiousĀ standards, is taking one day at a time.
I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about ‘salami technique’ (aka ‘chunking’ or ‘segmentation’) in RyR sessions.
This is a technique used in simultaneous to help the interpreter deal with the cognitive load of dense information and the differences in sentence structure between language pairs. Salami technique can also help you avoid linguistic interference, and it makes the message easier for the audience and relay-takers to digest.
It consists of breaking up long sentences (or rather, ideas) into smaller chunks in the target language, using ‘open syntax’ – by which I mean syntax that gives you many options for what to say next, rather than backing you into a corner. In practice, this means connecting ideas with coordinating conjunctions (‘and’, ‘but’, ‘so’ and their equivalents – ‘however’, ‘thus’, ‘in addition’), rather than connecting ideas with words like ‘despite’, ‘although’, or with relative clauses.
I don’t recall being taught specifically how to use salami technique. I think it was mentioned in passing: ‘break long sentences up into smaller ones’, but no-one broke it down into:
identify ‘units of meaning’
reformulate a unit of meaning into an independent utterance (in grammatical terms, this is usually a clause or sentence)
connect this to the next unit of meaning using coordinating conjunctions, making sure to preserve the logic of the original speech
I don’t want to turn this post into a very lengthy explanation of salami technique, so I’ll just make two important points:
people often worry that if they use salami technique, the output will sound childish. a) you don’t have to use salami technique with every single sentence in the speech. It’s a coping strategy intended to help you deal with particular challenges, so you can use it judiciously. However, if you never practise it, you’ll find it hard to use. And b) salami technique relies on simple syntax (subject-verb-object with a few frills), but you can use technical, formal, or sophisticated vocabulary, and you can express complex ideas even if the grammar is straightforward.
people often imagine salami technique as being all about chopping long sentences into lots of short ones, but in fact, sometimes you don’t make a long sentence shorter at all; you just change the syntax to make it ‘open’, which makes your life as an interpreter much easier.
The first exercise (below) is intended to help you identify units of meaning, i.e. an idea, something that could stand alone as an utterance.
For example, in the sentence “Despite severe delays at Manchester airport this morning, most delegates have made it to today’s meeting.”:
“Despite” is not a unit of meaning.
“Despite severe” is not a unit of meaning.
“Despite severe delays” is not (quite) a unit of meaning – delays with what?
“Despite severe delays at Manchester airport this morning” IS a unit of meaning. You could turn it into “There have been severe delays at Manchester airport this morning”.
If you were ‘chunking’ the sentence, you could say:
“There have been severe delays at Manchester airport this morning, BUT most delegates have made it to today’s meeting.” (inserting BUT to preserve the meaning of ‘despite’).
Beginners tend to either wait too long (i.e. they don’t start their interpretation until they’ve heard the whole sentence, up to ‘today’s meeting’), or they launch into the sentence without knowing where they’re going (perhaps after ‘despite severe delays’). Neither technique is safe; if you systematically wait too long, you end up leaving out information. If you start too soon, you take unnecessary risks (what if an unknown word comes up?).
Exercise 1- text (basic level)
For this exercise, it’s best to have a paper copy of the text you’ll be working with. You can copy/paste it and print it off, download the article and print it, or whatever works for you!
What you need to do is read through the text, putting a forward slash wherever you identify a unit of meaning. [This text is an adapted version of an article from the Guardian.]
Here’s the first paragraph, but the whole text is in the PDF below.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, today I want to talk about the opinions of Diane Abbott, who is, or was, Britainās first black Labour MP. In the papers at the weekend, she wrote an article in which she expressed the idea that the racism experienced by black people in the UK cannot be compared with, or is on a different scale than, the prejudice (as she called it) experienced by Jewish people in the UK, or Irish travellers, or other ethnic minority groups.
In other words, she was establishing a hierarchy of racism, where āmy racism is worse than your racismā, and where she was almost minimising the significance of antisemitism, which is very much a sore point for the Labour party in the UK at the moment.
In fact, she actually likened the prejudice, as she called it – not āracismā- experienced by Jewish people and Travellers, with the same sort of thing experienced by people who have red hair.”
Here’s my version:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, / today I want to talk about the opinions of Diane Abbott, / who is, / or was, / Britainās first black Labour MP. / In the papers at the weekend, she wrote an article / in which she expressed the idea that the racism experienced by black people in the UK / cannot be compared with, or is on a different scale than, the prejudice (as she called it) experienced by Jewish people in the UK, / or Irish travellers, / or other ethnic minority groups. /
In other words, she was establishing a hierarchy of racism, / where āmy racism is worse than your racismā, / and where she was almost minimising the significance of antisemitism, / which is very much a sore point for the Labour party in the UK at the moment./
In fact, she actually likened the prejudice, as she called it / – not āracismā- / experienced by Jewish people and Travellers, with the same sort of thing experienced by people who have red hair.” /
A few notes:
I’m not sure ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ can be called an idea, but it’s certainly not dependent on anything else, so I’ve classed it as a unit of meaning (a form of address or greeting).
‘who is, or was, Britain’s first black Labour MP’. I’ve put a forward slash between who is / or was / Britains’ first…. Ideally, I would have used two colours, because in reality, ‘who is…Britain’s first black Labour MP’ is one unit of meaning, and ‘or was’ is another (stuck in the middle). In practice, when interpreting, you might choose to chunk the sentence by saying something like ‘Diane Abbott is Britain’s first black Labour MP, or rather…she was.’ By the way, I made a mistake at this point, because she was in fact Britain’s first black woman MP.
There’s a similar example in this passage: ‘cannot be compared with, or is on a different scale than, the prejudice (as she called it) experienced by Jewish people in the UK’. There are three units here, with one of them split into two by the phrase ‘or is on a different scale’: anti-black racism cannot be compared with prejudice experienced by Jewish people in the UK. It’s on a different scale. And prejudice is the word chosen by Diane Abbott. (If you chose to interpret the passage like this, a hefty dose of emphasis on the word ‘prejudice’ (in your voice) would help with the last part.
‘she wrote an article / in which she expressed the idea that the racism experienced by black people in the UK’: you’re probably thinking that the second part of this is not a unit of meaning, because we don’t yet know what she says about the racism experienced by black people. However, this part of the sentence could be reformulated as something like ‘In her article, she talks about (or ‘she addresses’) the racism experienced by black people in the UK today’, and then you could continue with the next unit of meaning, for example, ‘and she claims it cannot be compared with….’
You could segment even further. For example, you could argue that ‘in the papers at the weekend’ is a unit of meaning, since you could say ‘some newspapers are published at the weekend. Diane Abbott wrote an article for a newspaper. In her article she says….’. But there comes a point where slicing the salami this thinly makes the output longer and less natural. š
This text, and the video below, contain the ‘n’ word (in a quote), so please don’t read or listen if you find this offensive.
We’ll try this with a different section of the text, but you can of course go through the whole text in the same way.
Your task is, again, to go through and identify units of meaning. Then for each unit of meaning, see how you can reformulate it (out loud or in your head) to make an independent utterance (a sentence, or a clause that you connect to the next one as necessary).
Could you tackle the units of meaning in a different order?
*note: you can reformulate from English into English (if English is your A or B language), or from English into your A language.
“To counter her argument that the āprejudiceā experienced by Irish, Jewish and Traveller people is not a patch on the āracismā suffered by black people, I cannot improve on the letter from someone whose family left a city in Poland where more than 99% of Jews were exterminated for their race and whose experiences of British antisemitism includes having Nazi insignia brandished in their face. As the anonymous writer says: āTo compare those experiences to the struggles of redheads is incomprehensible.ā”
“Her argument is that Irish, Jewish people, and Travellers experience prejudice, but this prejudice is far less serious than the racism suffered by black people. The best way to counter this is a letter from someone whose family left Poland. They lived in a city where more than 99% of Jews were killed for their race. The author has experienced British antisemitism. For example they have had Nazi insignia brandished in their face. The anonymous writer says: “To compare those experiences to the struggles of redheads is incomprehensible.””
There are of course other ways of ‘chunking’ this text.
For example, you may notice that I have held ‘to counter [her argument]’ in my working memory until the second sentence. I’ve merged it with ‘I cannot improve on the letter….’.
Instead, you could say: ‘how can we counter this argument? The best response is a letter from….’.
Or: ‘how can we counter this argument? With a letter from….’ (here, we lose the idea of ‘best’).
You may also notice that I haven’t chunked every single unit of meaning. In theory, we could say “They lived in a city. In this city, more than 99% of Jews were killed. They were killed for their race.” Similarly, we could say “The writer is anonymous. The writer says:….” However, this is no more concise than the original, and is rather unnatural. This illustrates the fact that you don’t have to use salami technique 100% of the time, especially if it makes your output unnatural.
Exercise 3
Let’s move on to the spoken word.
You can choose ONE of the following exercises to work with, or you can do them all in order.
Basic level
Listen to the video (no interpreting!), and tap on the table whenever you identify a unit of meaning.
Intermediate level
Watch the video. As you’re listening, as soon as you identify a unit of meaning, press pause. Think about how you could reformulate what you’ve heard as a separate sentence (or clause), using SVO order where possible (subject, verb, object).
You can do this English>English if English is your A or B language, or you can reformulate in your A language if English is a C. Or you can do both! š
Advanced level
This time, watch the video, and either interpret it into your A language (if that isn’t English), OR do a simultaneous reformulation of the content, i.e. work from English into English, using salami technique where possible.
It takes discipline to go from English into English and AVOID repeating everything you hear.
Remember, this is not a shadowing exercise, but a reformulation exercise.
I hope you found this salami technique exercise useful!
