Finishing Things

Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Gold Forest English podcast. My name is Jordan and today I want to talk about words that connect to the idea of finishing and stopping.

So we're going to look at some phrases to talk about finishing habits or jobs, relationships, different actions that have stopped.

So, of course, we can use the word finish, or the word stop, but in English, we've got several phrases or vocabulary words, which have the same meaning. So I want to talk about some of them today.

So our first one is any more. Any more in British English, we write any more as two words. any and more. but in American English, they use anymore as one word, anymore. So the word any more, it means about stopping and finishing. It's to show that something happened in the past, but it doesn't happen now. So it did happen in the past. It was true before. For example, ‘I don't eat meat anymore.’ so now I am a vegetarian. In the past I used to eat meat and I don't eat I don't eat meat any more.

Similar to any more is the phrase any longer. Any longer is a bit more formal. And we often put it into more business situations, formal, yeah, business and polite writing and things like that. Maybe academic or legal writing, we might use the word any longer. These are two words. So, for example, ‘He doesn't work here any longer.’ Maybe somebody has emailed my company trying to talk to one of my staff, but that staff member has finished working at my company. I might reply to this customer and say that this member of staff ‘he doesn't work here any longer.’ So it's a bit more of a formal and polite situation. I could use any more because it has the same meaning, but because it's a formal situation, I would use any longer to be more formal and polite.

Very similar to any more in word is no more. No more is a similar word, any more, no more. However, the meaning is quite different. The use is quite different. We use the words no more to go specifically with nouns, with things, not with actions. And it means that there are zero of this noun remaining. There's none left for example, ‘There's no more milk in the fridge. Can you please buy some milk when you come home from work?’ So the meaning is we have zero milk. We did have milk before and now we have zero milk. There's no more milk in the fridge.

We can also use no more to talk about things that are not allowed or not possible so a teacher might say to the students, ‘No more talking, please. We're going to do a test.’ No more talking. So asking the students to be silent and to stop talking. Talking is not allowed anymore No more talking, please So one that was formal.

I mentioned no longer any longer. I mentioned that any longer was formal no longer is also formal. So no longer is another formal phrase. So you can see the pattern of the words with more - any more and no more. These are more. These are standard English, their natural and their neutral meanings, but the vocabulary with longer - any longer, no longer, these are more formal words. These are formal words. So no longer is a formal phrase, and we use it for writing, more formal English and we might say something like, ‘I no longer have the documents.’ I no longer have the documents. Maybe my boss has written me an email asking me for some specific documents, but I do not have them now. I've given them to somebody else. I might say I no longer have the documents so this is a very formal phrase and it means I did in the past, but I don't now. And as it is a formal verb phrase, it does go before the verb in the sentence. ‘I no longer have the documents’ - have is the verb in that sentence, and we put no longer before the verb.

Okay, so those are a couple of different phrases. I've just quickly talked about them. Of course, I definitely recommend that you have a look on our website, goldforestacademy.com, and you can see our full blog post about these words, about these phrases, and that will give you a lot more detail, more examples and things like that so that you can better understand how to use these phrases in this podcast style. I just touch on them. I just mentioned them. I just talk about them briefly. So for your learning, I definitely recommend to go on the website, goldforestacademy.com and check out the full blog post about this topic, which is expanded with a lot more information.

Okay, well, I hope that I've been able to give you some things to think about, and I hope you've had a good day today so far. Thank you very much for listening. I will see you in the next episode. Goodbye.