Your five sentences
Read out the five description sentences you copied from Ted Lasso. Then say which one you would not have dared to say about a real person.
One prediction before you read anything.
1. You want to say a colleague is lazy. In English, what does a fluent speaker usually do?
Three difficult people
Read all three. Then underline every word that makes the judgement softer than it could have been.
Isa, on a flatmate
She is lovely, genuinely. But she can be a bit much first thing in the morning. She talks from about seven, and I am not really a talker until nine.
I think she does not notice. It is not deliberate. She just seems to wake up already halfway through a conversation.
Karl, on a brother-in-law
He is not the easiest person to spend a weekend with, I would say. He tends to know quite a lot about everything, if you see what I mean.
To be fair, he is much more generous than I am. And he is very good with my kids — better than I am, probably. It is just that a whole weekend is a long time.
Ana, on a former manager
She was not as bad as people said. Demanding, definitely. But she was as hard on herself as she was on everybody else, which counts for something.
I would say she was less patient than she thought she was. She seemed to believe she was quite relaxed. Nobody who worked for her thought that.
All three say critical things. Answer from what is on the page.
1. Isa says She can be a bit much. What are can be and a bit doing?
2. Karl says He tends to know quite a lot about everything. What does he actually mean?
3. Ana says she was as hard on herself as she was on everybody else. What does as … as mean?
4. She also says She was not as bad as people said. So was she bad?
Six polite phrases from the three texts. Match each to what the speaker actually means.
The hedging toolkit
Four ways to soften a judgement
| Move | Looks like | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Frequency | can be · tends to · sometimes | Not always — just sometimes |
| Degree | a bit · quite · a little · slightly | Not much — just a little |
| Ownership | I think · it seems to me · I would say | My opinion, not a fact |
| Negated positive | not the easiest · not exactly patient | Says the negative without saying it |
Stack two and you can say almost anything.
He is lazy. → I think he can be a bit slow to get going, sometimes.
Four hedges on one adjective. Nobody would call that dishonest — it is what a careful speaker does, and the listener understands it perfectly.
Match each hedge to the kind of softening it does.
Soften them
Six blunt sentences. Rewrite each one with at least two hedges, keeping the meaning.
1. He is lazy.
2. She is arrogant.
3. He is boring.
4. She is mean with money.
5. He is stupid.
6. She never listens.
One word per gap. Complete the hedges — this is a description of a difficult neighbour.
He is fine, mostly. He be a difficult about the parking, and he to complain about noise at about nine in the evening, which is early. I he does not mean anything by it. To be , he is very good with the older people in the building. He is exactly friendly, but he is not unfriendly either.
Someone difficult
Task card · Speaking
Someone you find difficult — a colleague, a neighbour, a relative.
Two minutes. Say what is difficult about them, using at least five hedges, and one genuinely good thing about them.
- No names. A colleague is enough.
- Every criticism gets at least one hedge. Two is better.
- One To be fair… somewhere in the middle — a balancing point.
- Your teacher will stop you every time an unhedged judgement comes out.
One decision.
1. You want to say a colleague talks too much. Which is most natural?
How many stops
Answer about the two minutes.
1. How many times were you stopped for an unhedged judgement?
2. Which move came most naturally?
Before the comparatives
One question.
1. She was not as patient as she thought. Was she patient?
Before Lesson 3. Think of two people you know well who are very different from each other. Do not write anything — just be able to name them tomorrow.
Next lesson is comparatives, and comparing two real people you know is the only version of that exercise that is worth doing.