Are you improving your English at breakneck speed?

Hello there! Sorry for my absence, but … too much work and a bit of vacation are the reason. Anyway, here is this month’s post. Continuing with parts of the body I thought I’d address collocations with “neck”.  On the left are the ten first nouns that occur before “neck” in a search in the COCA corpus (www.americancorpus.org); on the right, compound words with “neck”. Teaneck and Mamaroneck are proper names therefore of no interest to us.

And here are some examples and illustrations:

Arch. Otolaryngol
Head Neck Surgery
2004:130:813-8
A medical term in the title of a journal
Since we’re in the medical field, here are two more examples:
• She steps closer to the mirror and raises her chin so her turkey neck disappears.
• Whether you’re faced with wrinkles, spots, or the dreaded turkey neck, doctors agree that keeping up a youthful appearance starts with sunscreen.

Jen, a 38-year-old pharmacist, is having liposuction done on her chin and neck to remedy what she calls a chicken neck.

One more kind of neck:
• I’d never seen a neck that large in my life, like a bull neck, you know?

Now, let’s move to the fashion industry – lots of different “necks”. Some are spelled as one word, some as two, and some have both spellings, like the one below:
• Styles include floral-printed crewneck shirts.
• This can be either V or crew neck?

Let’s take a look at some of the other “necks”:
He wore a white scoop neck t-shirt, faded jeans.

I could see her adjust her lilac-colored V-neck blouse.

Red turtleneck sweaters were her style.
So, here are the equivalents in Portuguese:
Crewneck – gola careca
Scoop neck – gola cavada
V-neck – decote V
Turtleneck – gola olímpica
Figuratively, “neck” can also be used in other contexts:

I wasn’t physically capable of getting my fingers around the guitar neck. I was just eight at the time.

“I’m just a redneck farmer,” he said.
Yes, working long hours in the sun gives them a red neck…
The next one may have two meanings:
• The man next to him, an even stockier roughneck, didn’t bother to look.
meaning somebody who is rough, rude.
• An experienced roughneck makes $26.50 an hour.
• Two cooks were hired on the spot for roughneck wages of $18 an hour.
• My father wasn’t a roughneck but he was rough enough, and he wanted better for me.

A worker on an oilrig – trabalhador em plataforma de petróleo.
Some more figurative meanings:
1. Trouble begins early when several of the expeditions are lagging behind due to the bottleneck at the Hillary step.
2. The Gulf Coast is particularly glutted with crude, due in part to a pipeline bottleneck.
3. A pipeline bottleneck in Cushing, Okla., has slowed the path to refineries in Texas and Louisiana.
1.

The Portuguese translation for these different situations is also different: “congestionamento” for example 1, and “estrangulamento” for examples 2 and 3.
The smallest bandwidth along the path is referred to as the bottleneck bandwidth.
In Portuguese: “gargalo da largura de banda”, that is, the place during the transmission of data where the bandwidth is the tightest.
• She could see he was studying with a hot gooseneck lamp on his desk.
• She flips off the overhead light and focuses her gooseneck desk lamp on the floor in front of her mirror.
• And just above that a microphone was mounted on a five-inch gooseneck extender.

And here is an expression for something that is really fast:
• The storm reaches them at breakneck speed.
• Jen maneuvered “the monster” around and cruised down the driveway at breakneck speed.
We don’t seem to have a similar expression in Portuguese, but “velocidade espantosa” or “velocidade vertiginosa” might be good translations.
The next expression probably comes from horse races, but can be used for any kind of race:
• They’re now separated by only two points and in a neck-and-neck race.
• The two cars race neck-and-neck.