"If you spot out..." should be "If you spot anything you might have..."
"Articulated" doesn't quite work because the past tense shades towards meaning "movable with joints" instead of "express." I'd have gone with the simpler "said differently."
Honestly, it gets really tough at this level, because native speakers learn these shades of meaning - if they learn them at all - through years of exposure and practice. A lot of them are just conventions. There's no dictionary or textbook for them. They're just standardised language quirks which everyone knows and copies.
I would not suggest you learn by reading the great English prose stylists, because a lot of the stylings are archaic. It's great writing and can be entertaining and enjoyable, but it's not a prose style you want to emulate because it will sound stuffy and pompous in a modern context.
Instead I'd buy a shelf full of novels by 20th century and later writers. Orwell is always good, but also Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Don DeLillo, Iain Banks, maybe Thomas Pynchon at a stretch. Definitely Terry Pratchett and JK Rowling. Among many others.
Don't just read them, see if you can understand how they use social register to set tone and define character in different social contexts.
For day to day English your best bet is probably the magazine industry. Regular reading of tech magazines and wider cultural and political commentary will help a lot.
"Articulated" doesn't quite work because the past tense shades towards meaning "movable with joints" instead of "express."
That didn't even cross my mind. That's probably "an engineer's perspective" so to speak.
These days, lots of words have different meanings to different people, depending upon the context of their lives, and it's getting really hard to treat anything as a lingua franca, even English which gets called "globish," because we have so many people with such rich and varied knowledge bases who use the same words to mean different things entirely.
I do agree that said is the better word, but mostly because it's shorter and more common and not because there is much risk of it being misinterpreted, given the context.
Comments
Correction in your last para:
"If you spot out..." should be "If you spot anything you might have..."
"Articulated" doesn't quite work because the past tense shades towards meaning "movable with joints" instead of "express." I'd have gone with the simpler "said differently."
Honestly, it gets really tough at this level, because native speakers learn these shades of meaning - if they learn them at all - through years of exposure and practice. A lot of them are just conventions. There's no dictionary or textbook for them. They're just standardised language quirks which everyone knows and copies.
I would not suggest you learn by reading the great English prose stylists, because a lot of the stylings are archaic. It's great writing and can be entertaining and enjoyable, but it's not a prose style you want to emulate because it will sound stuffy and pompous in a modern context.
See also: "social register." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)
Instead I'd buy a shelf full of novels by 20th century and later writers. Orwell is always good, but also Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Don DeLillo, Iain Banks, maybe Thomas Pynchon at a stretch. Definitely Terry Pratchett and JK Rowling. Among many others.
Don't just read them, see if you can understand how they use social register to set tone and define character in different social contexts.
For day to day English your best bet is probably the magazine industry. Regular reading of tech magazines and wider cultural and political commentary will help a lot.
"Articulated" doesn't quite work because the past tense shades towards meaning "movable with joints" instead of "express."
That didn't even cross my mind. That's probably "an engineer's perspective" so to speak.
These days, lots of words have different meanings to different people, depending upon the context of their lives, and it's getting really hard to treat anything as a lingua franca, even English which gets called "globish," because we have so many people with such rich and varied knowledge bases who use the same words to mean different things entirely.
I do agree that said is the better word, but mostly because it's shorter and more common and not because there is much risk of it being misinterpreted, given the context.
Honestly, to this native speaker, articulated was a perfectly good word choice in this instance & one that I might have made myself.
I agree; I don’t think the alternate meaning of 'jointed movement' is going to occur to the majority of people - it’s really not in common use.