Photo credit: http://www.thrilld.com
Don’t worry – today I won’t bore you with long definitions and endless examples.
I’m pretty sure by this time everyone knows about how miserable this summer has been in the UK, but today was one of the rare days with some serious sunshine. So I went to buy some fruit from a greengrocer and had the following conversation:
– It’s nicer today!
– Oh yes (I’m bad at small talk, yet it is an absolute survival skill in this country)
– About time (pronounced very sarcastically).
Actually, I couldn’t resist looking this up in the dictionary just in case. Apparently, ‘about time‘ has two relatively similar meanings: 1) used for saying that someone should do something soon; 2) in spoken language it’s used for showing that you are annoyed because something has happened later than it should (MacMillan Dictionary).
PS. Speaking of greengrocers, did you know such thing as a greengrocers’ apostrophe existed?
Confessions of the Linguistic Spy 