To sue someone means that you want to go to a court and ask for money because someone has done something bad to you or has said something bad about you.

So, you sue someone for something.

For example:

• You can sue McDonald’s if you come across a spider in your Happy Meal.
• “I’ll sue that idiot, he has stolen my car!”

Weird-Al Yankovic:

See the entire video here.

Vocabulary:
court =  trials take place there and crimes are judged
to come across = find coincidentally, find/see something without looking for it

Let’s talk about language.

Writing formal letters isn’t easy. You have to watch your language and avoid using contractions or slang expressions. Imagine that you work for a company in the US and you have to write an e-mail to a vendor in Spain.

If you would use a sentence like: “We need our next delivery in a New York minute, you know”, you will a) not be taken as a professional employee and b) The recipient  of the message may not understand the collocation you have used.

So, keep in mind that for formal letters you should use no contractions and no collocations the recipient may could not understand.

From The IT Crowd:

In the video above you can hear a very good example of a beginning for a formal e-mail. Moss writes to an unknown recipient as follows:
Dear Sir or Madam

And to finish his e-mail he uses a very common sentence:
Looking forward to hearing from you.

The expression “Looking forward to..” is always followed by an infinitive.

Vocabulary:
a New York minute = very fast
premises = land and the buildings on it with their offices…

And you may be asking yourself: “What on earth is this site supposed to be?”

Well, I am a learner of English and I try to improve my skills all the time. So, I decided to build that little blog here and post regularly some interesting bits of news or anything else that’s on my mind. You, who reads my posts, are free to comment on them and tell me what thoughts ran through your head when you read it.

Tell me if I’m right or if I’m wrong. Tell me about my grammar and other mistakes. Tell me everything you want me to know.

This blog’s purpose is to improve my language. Fortunately,  technologies of the 21st century allow me to share my knowledge, tips and also mistakes. I hope that someone out there will like this blog and that it will help people to benefit from what I’m doing here.

The end of the first post is the beginning of www.semironie.ch. Enjoy it.