When talking to my advanced students, I often compare learning a language to swimming against the current: if you stop swimming you go backwards. Learning a language is a life-long pursuit.
In a metaphorical sense, swimming against the current means going against prevailing opinion or thought, as in I'm voting for him even if that is swimming against the current. Shakespeare used a similar metaphor in Henry IV "You must now speak Sir John Falstaff fair, which swims against your stream." You can also say swim against the stream or tide. The antonym is swim with the tide.
Actividad desplegable
Match the following "swimming" idioms with their definitions.
Now take a break from all those idioms and listen to Nightswimming by REM.
Another reason why we are language learners for life is the fact that language changes as our world changes. Our everyday vocabulary is full of neologisms, expressing ideas that we wouldn't even have understood not long ago. Words like blog, mansplaining, mashup, sexting, bromance, muggle or to google did not exist 20 years ago. All these words entered the language very recently.
Guess if the following words entered the English language in the 60s, 70s or 80s.
Objetivos
The Oxford English Dictionary is updated on a quarterly basis. Here you can check out updates from March 2000 to the present.
