Contents
=> Plenty of Ways to Say ‘Many’
=> In the Next Issue

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Plenty of Ways to Say ‘Many’
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There are lots of ways to say “many/much” in English. Like “lots of,” for example.

You can use the following as a metalinguistic activity in class. That is, the students are not particularly USING English, but they are examining it in a very useful way. (As a happy by-product, they will also learn how to check English statistically through the internet).PART I

Ask your students to brainstorm a list of alternatives for “many/much.” You may give them one or two as a headstart.

When they’ve finished write the following words on the board:

a bunch of
a buttload of
a great deal of
a lot of
lots of
loads of
a mass of
oodles of
plenty of
a ton of
tons of

Note that all of these can replace “many” OR “much.”

PART II

Your students may have come up with different answers in their brainstorming. That’s fine.

Anyway, now give them with the above list. In groups or pairs they are going to examine the register of each expression–or how FORMAL or INFORMAL each expression is.

Ask them to draw a scale on a piece of paper, like so:

FORMAL —————————————– INFORMAL

Then ask them to write the phrases where they belong on the scale. They can debate and discuss their choics. When they are finished, they can compare with my scale (below), although mine is by no means absolutely correct.
Register (level of formality) is debatable. So let students discuss it.

FORMAL —————————————– INFORMAL

a lot of (middle range)
lots of (middle range)
plenty of (middle range)
tons of (towards informal)
a ton of (towards informal)
a great deal of (towards formal)
a bunch of (towards informal)
a mass of (middle to formal)
loads of (middle to slightly informal)
oodles of (informal)
a buttload of (very informal)

PART III

The next question to ask is which of these phrases are most common?

I searched for them on the internet using the Google search engine. The number of “hits” can tell you how often people are using these terms. (Also, a quick examanation of the context will tell you if they are used in formal or
informal siituations).

Ask students to try to rank them by frequency of usage.

(If you have computers in class, send students to the net to do a search. They can record the number of “hits” and one or two sample phrases to report to the class. Compare the data.)

Here are the results that I came up with, in order of most frequent to least frequent…

a lot of — 11,300, 000
lots of — 8,960, 000
plenty of — 4,510, 000
tons of — 3,680, 000
a great deal of — 2,730, 000
a bunch of — 2,460, 000
loads of — 1,530, 000
a ton of — 975, 000
a mass of — 508, 000
oodles of — n94, 000
a buttload of — 11, 000 (very young and slangy)

It probably comes as no surprise that “a lot of” and “lots of” are the most common. But “plenty of” has 4 and a half million hits! That’s common.
Do your students know the expression? They will now.

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In the Next Issue:
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“ETs in Russia and Elsewhere” will resume
twice-monthly publication now that the school year
is starting again. The next issue will come out
on or about September 6, 2004.

Next Issue: How do you translate “REMONT?”