Ask Alisha: Your English Questions Answered #234 - How Word Stress Can Completely Change Meaning in English
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Hi everybody, welcome back to Ask Alisha, the weekly series where you ask me questions and I answer them. Maybe. Let's get to your first question this week. First question comes from Soni Cosio. Hi Soni, or Soni, I hope I said your name correctly. Soni asked, what's the difference between carpet and rug?

Rug. Super interesting question. It's very simple, actually. A rug, usually, is the piece of fabric that you bring into a room to set on the floor.

Carpet, however, is usually used for the floor covering that is already in the room. So, for example, if you buy a house or if you move into a rental house or rental apartment, carpet is usually the word that we use for the floor covering that is already

there. That's usually the word that we use. Perhaps you will hear people refer to that as a rug, but usually people refer to that as a carpet. So you could say like, oh no, I stained the carpet, or I'm not sure I like the carpet color in this room. It sounds like carpet is something that is fixed in the room, like you can't

pick it up easily and move it to another room. So, carpet refers to this thing that is already in that space, that's the floor covering there, that's usually soft, okay?

On the other hand, rug refers to something you can usually roll up and you can roll it out in the room and create your own covering for the floor. So these can be maybe soft, they can be like beautiful like pieces of artwork. So a rug is something that you can easily pick up and move to another room if you want.

So it is also a floor covering, but it is not fixed in place. So again, you may hear people kind of try to use carpet and rug interchangeably. You may hear people do that. But basically, a rug is something that is very easy to move from room to room. One

word that I think is useful to include in this group then is the word mat. So you might also hear a mat used in talking about like interior design. This is one that we usually use in like the bathroom or in the kitchen. Some place that we need to have maybe a

kind of a little bit of protection on the floor against like moisture, like water, for example. So you might hear about a bath mat or perhaps it might be called a bath rug, but we usually wouldn't call it a bath carpet because it's not fixed to the ground. We can pick it up and clean it. You might also hear this in the kitchen as well, like a kitchen mat or something similar to that.

So you might also hear "mat" used in these cases. Those kind of sound like they might have something on the bottom of it to help it like stop from slipping as well, so they might be a little bit sticky. Or some other material like rubber might be on the bottom to help it grip the floor a little more easily. A rug usually does not have that. So I hope this quick answer helps break down the differences between carpet, rug, and even mat. So now you can talk about your interior design preferences perfectly.

Thanks very much for an interesting question. Okay, let's move on to your next question. Next question comes from Constantine. Hi, Constantine. Constantine asked, hi, Alicia, what is the difference between all time and all the time? Thanks. Okay, super interesting question. So let's talk about time.

all time first. When we use the expression all time, it's often in an expression relating to someone who is the best at something or maybe the worst at something. So when we talk about say for example the greatest athlete of all time or the greatest singer of all time, we are talking about someone who is the best at their job, the best at their creative profession, the best at their sport in all of history. So all

time is used as a set expression usually in these kinds of situations. He's the greatest athlete of all time. She's the greatest performer of all time. The best-selling author of all time. So that means in all of history. So all time is used in these set expressions. One other really really fun thing to note is that you might have seen the expression goat used when talking about people who are very very good at what they do. This g-o-a-t

O-A-T word is actually another way to say very quickly that someone is the greatest of all time. So you might see, especially on the internet or maybe in text messages, someone say, oh, he's the goat or she's the goat. And this is a short way of saying he's the greatest of all time or she's the greatest of all time. So that's what this goat means. It doesn't actually mean like the farm animal. So watch out for that.

So all time is used to talk about all of history and it's often used to talk about people who are the best at things. Though you might hear people talking about the worst of something like this was the worst day of all time. Maybe if someone has a really bad day, they might exaggerate like that.

So let's compare this then to all the time. All the time is used to talk about things that happen to us very, very regularly. So for example, you might say, I call my best friend all the time, or I talk to my mom all the time. It means very regularly, or it refers to something that you do a lot. It is a very common activity for you.

So we cannot use all the time and all time interchangeably, although they do sound very similar. So please keep this in mind next time you want to talk about your activities. When you're talking about something that you do regularly as part of your schedule,

You should use all the time to describe that. When you want to talk about something that is very, very significant in history, you can use all time. And usually we use the superlative with that, the greatest or the worst, for example, of all time. So I hope this quick answer breaks down the differences between all time and all the time for you. Thanks very much for sending this interesting question along. Okay, let's move to our next question. Next question comes from Amy. Hi, Amy. Amy asked, can you play

Okay, super interesting question here. So let's break

break down what this kind of different stress does. And so we're going to do this by looking at how we can stress the different words in this sentence to change the meaning. So we'll choose a few different words so we can see what happens just by emphasizing different places in the sentence. So first, "I didn't say we should call him." This sounds like very, very neutral, right? We don't have a lot of stress on any word, right? Just a very neutral statement. But if we stress the first word in that sentence, "I," like,

I didn't say we should call him. So this sentence sounds like, okay, the speaker did not say we should call this person, but the speaker wants to make note, the speaker wants to express someone else said we should call him. I didn't say we should call him. My boss did or my friend did, but they don't want to say

who that person was, okay? Let's try this with a different word in the example sentence. Let's say, um, let's see, "I didn't say we should call him." If we put the emphasis on "we," "I didn't say we should call him," it sounds like, oh, the speaker wants to suggest that someone else should call him instead. So you can kind of see here when we stress

One of those words, it takes on the meaning of the opposite or an alternative something. It's like some other person or some other action. Let's try this same exercise by stressing the verb. I didn't say we should call him if we stress the verb there. It sounds like the speaker is suggesting we do something else to him or maybe for him.

I didn't say we should call him. So by doing this, we are kind of inviting the listener to say, oh, then what should we do in this situation? Should we write to him? Should we email him? Should we text him? Right? So it invites kind of alternative ideas when we stress these different parts of the sentence. We can do it with the last word too. I didn't say we should call him. So when we use him as the emphasis point in the sentence, it sounds like,

"Oh, so maybe we should call someone else." So all of this is kind of a way for the speaker to suggest alternatives, to say like, "Mm, there are other possibilities in this situation," but it's kind of leaving it to the listener. We're inviting the listener in a way to say, "Oh, should we do something else?" Or, "Are we the right people to do this?" Or these are like kind of

very passive ways of suggesting alternative courses of action or alternative things to do simply by stressing the word in the sentence. So I mentioned it very briefly before, but kind of a good guideline here is that if you hear a word stressed like this in a sentence, you can kind of think of it as the speaker wants to say the reverse of that thing. I

I didn't say we should call him. Our first example there means anyone but me is the person who said we should call him. Or in our last example, I didn't say we should call him. So the opposite of him would be anyone other than him, right? Or someone else that is not him, right? So that might be a kind of good guideline. When you hear these sentences that have this kind of very strong and sort of strange emphasis, you can think about that word as kind of like the reversed word.

So that might be a good guideline for how to understand these different sorts of stress that you hear in sentences. And again, if the verb is the thing that is stressed in the sentence, that means we are considering verbs that are not that verb, but there may be related to that verb. So this is a rather open answer, but this is one that I think that you will gain more understanding with as you hear example sentences like these more in

more. So thanks very much for sending this interesting question along and I hope that this helps you understand how to break down these sentences with interesting stress patterns. All right, that is everything that I have for this week. So thank you as always for sending your great questions. Thanks very much for watching this week's episode of Ask Alisha and I will see you again next time. Bye!