I just can’t get him out of the habit. My friend A will call, as he did on Friday night, and say things like, ‘We were thinking of going for a walking later and would be pleased if you could join us’.

I’m certain that I have corrected him a number of times – but you can’t do it every time, can you?

But it’s the same with our Engineering Manager here. His level of English is very good but there are couple of things that, at this advanced stage, are difficult for him to shake.

>One is the use of ‘or’ and ‘or’. Whereas we use ‘either one thing or the other’ in Italian they actually use ‘o one thing o the other’ – ‘o’ standing for ‘or’.

Unsurprisingly, then, he will use ‘or one thing or the other’. I have corrected it a couple of times but this one is deeply ingrained.

Similarly, his use of the word ‘terrific’. When he uses it he means awful or terrible. This one is, almost, funny because he will start a sentence with something like ‘It will be terrific when something happens….’ and then follows it with the details of why it will, in fact, be close to a disaster! It makes me smile, inwardly. I’m not sure I have corrected him on this one and because he uses it quite often, he might find it ‘terrific’ (using his interpretation) if he knew that all this time he’s been using the wrong word!