Same Meaning, Different Feeling

Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Gold Forest English podcast. As always, my name is Jordan, and today I want to talk about some words which have the same meaning but different feelings.

At the beginning of your English language learning journey, you learn a lot of vocabulary, and there's different meanings, different words. But as you progress more with your English and become more advanced with your English, we start to find words which have same or similar meanings, but with different feelings. They might be polite and friendly or they might be negative and rude. So to day I want to talk briefly about some of these words.

The first words, three words, the first three words that I want to talk about are skinny, slim, and thin. So these three words, skinny, slim, and thin, they all mean not fat, not overweight. but the feeling of these words is quite different. So we'll starting with the first one, skinny.
Skinny is a word which feels negative. It's saying that somebody is too thin, too much thin. They may be unhealthy or weak. It can be quite rude to describe somebody as skinny. If I say, she looks really skinny, I think she needs to eat more food. I'm saying that she doesn't look good. She doesn't look healthy. She's skinny.
Different from this at the opposite end is the word slim. Slim is very positive, very polite. It means attractive and healthy. If I say, she looks really slim, this is a compliment. It's a nice thing to say. She's looking attractive and healthy body. So skinny is negative, slim is positive.
The third word, thin, is a neutral word. It's neutral. It's not good, it's not bad. It's just a fact. It's just information. She is thin. This is a description. I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing.
So if we want to give a compliment to somebody, we can use the word slim. You look very slim. If you want to show that you are maybe worried about somebody's health, we could use the word skinny. You look skinny. You need to eat more carefully. You're not, you don't look healthy. So those are our first three words, skinny, slim, and thin, same meaning, but different feeling.

The next three words I want to talk about are old, elderly, and senior. Old, elderly, and senior. So these words all mean aged, people who have many years in their life. So the first word that's very common is the word old. Old is a great adjective, and it's a very common adjective. And when we are talking about things, like a book or a movie or a mobile phone or a car, anything, we can use the adjective old, and it's normal. It's neutral. It's no problem. It's a fact, it's information about this thing. But when we use it for people, it can feel rude. It's a bit too direct. It's a bit a little bit rude to say he is old or she is old. So for things, it's no problem. I live in an old house. But for people, it can feel a little bit rude. So much better instead of using the word old for people, you could use the word elderly.
Elderly is a very polite and respectful word. We often use this word for people age seventy and over. So describing a person, she is an elderly woman. This is very polite, very respectful, but has the same meaning as old without the negative feeling. So elderly is polite and respectful.
Another word, which is polite and respectful, is senior, the third word that I mentioned. Senior is polite, but it's a bit more formal. It's often used for descriptions of jobs and services. For example, a senior discount at a cinema. If you're an older person, you might be able to get a discount on your tickets. and it's called a senior discount. So the word senior, similar to elderly, it's polite and it's respectful, but senior is a bit more formal. Elderly is common in conversation, written English, spoken English, all very common.
So the word we need to be a little bit careful with is the word old, old can feel rude when talking about people.
If you really like the word old, what we can do is change it a little bit to make it a little more polite. Instead of describing a person as old, we could say that they are older. He's an older man. This is much more polite than he's an old man. It's a very, very similar word. We're just adding ER, but it feels less negative in conversation English, in spoken English, describing a person as older, feels more polite and considerate, more respectful, more than old.
So I would say that the least polite word is old, more polite is older, and then most polite is elderly. and we also have the word senior, which is very polite, but it feels a bit more formal, so it's not always correct for spoken English. So we could describe people as an older woman, an elderly woman, very, very polite, very respectful, and good for spoken language, everyday English.

So there we are. That's two little groups of words that I wanted to talk about. skinny, slim, and thin, and then old, elderly, and senior. Two groups of words that have very similar or the same meaning meaning, but different feelings. So if you want to learn a bit more about these words or some other groups of similar words, please check out my blog post on goldforestacademy.com, where I've got some more information and examples.

All right. Well, thank you very much for listening. I hope this was an interesting interesting episode for you and I hope I will see you in the next one. Thank you very much. Goodbye.