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you're just telling the story at the water-cooler, the ability to draw on such metaphors, especially place-specific metaphors adds a colour that cannot be obtained any other way.

If your motivation for improving your English is to improve your creative writing skills, you need to be aware that some words mean different things in different places. To take a favourite British English adjective: canny. He's a canny lad. In my native north east, that would mean he's good bloke, a decent chap. Nice. Well-meaning. A few miles north of the border into Scotland, it would mean that he was canny' in the sense of careful'extrapolated to mean careful with money'or more precisely "mean", tight-fisted. A few miles further south and west and into Lancashire, it might mean that he is fat. The only way to avoid such confusions is to listen and to talk to the locals and as embarrassing as it may be: to ask. My mam will testify it's the only way. After weeks of wondering why her workmates wouldn't disembark at the same bus stop, despite their explanations, she had to come home and ask: "what's "clarts"?"

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So always remember that language is a fabulous tool. It can be very powerful. It is also, however, a wonderful plaything. You will never gain complete mastery over it, for it moves and shifts with the times and that is one of the joys of studying it and using it. Words change their meanings over time or space. Unacceptable constructions become so commonplace that purists give up the fight against them. Even those of us who are native speakers, and who consider ourselves to have a reasonable grasp, have our blind spots. I doubt I will ever understand the difference between "owing to" and "due to" and will continue to misuse both (unless by ear I chance to get it right).

I will, however, continue to play around with words. Hopefully constructing them at times into articles that enlighten or stories that amuse. Using them to share my experiences and hopes. Finding better ways to express an emotion or flitting natural encounter.

I wish you the same never-ending voyage of discovery in the seas of my mother tongue.

Learn more about this author, Lesley Mason.
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