Name: 11 Stylish English Collocations: “feel free”, “crystal clear”, “special someone”...
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T16:27:34.000Z
Duration: 14 min 13 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I have a bit of a dual purpose lesson for you.

I'm going to talk to you a little bit about collocations, and I'm going to talk to you about alliteration, which is actually a very important tool for those of you who need to practice writing.

It gives you a little bit of style, as you'll see in a moment.

Collocations are pairings or groupings of words that commonly appear together.

Now, sometimes these can be idiomatic, meaning that when you put a couple of words together, or three or four words together, it might change their meaning.

But other times, it's just... they're just commonly put together because that's how the language works.

So, for example, you do homework, you don't take homework, you don't make homework.

So, do and homework are always put together, and this is a collocation.

Now, alliteration is a stylistic tool where you're putting words that begin with the same letter together.

And this creates a bit of a sound, and again, remember, it's mostly for writing, but it creates a sound in the speaker's mind that makes it a little bit prettier, I guess you could call it.

So, what I'm going to show you today are 11 collocations that are also alliterative, means they use alliteration when they're joined together.

Some of them are idiomatic, some of them are very straightforward, the words... each word separately works the same as when it's in a combination.

So, I have the F and I have the F, so feel free.

This is a very common collocation, people use it all the time.

It basically means, like, help yourself, or don't be shy, or like, basically, mi casa es su casa.

If you want to eat some food, yeah, feel free.

Go to the fridge, take whatever you want.

So, feel and free, each word by itself basically stays the same in the collocation.

This is a little bit more idiomatic, although crystal is basically very clear glass, and that's why it's clear.

So, it's a little bit redundant, but we use this collocation quite often as well.

So, if somebody asks you, do you understand?

If you want to emphasize that the explanation was very easy to understand, right?

No questions, no misunderstandings, and again, crystal clear, CC, that's your alliteration.

Now, another reason I made this lesson is because collocations are a little bit tricky for a lot of people.

The alliteration sometimes makes it a little bit easier to remember.

So, now, when we talk about a special someone, this is a little bit idiomatic.

If I say someone special, someone special means they could be very gifted, very talented, very beautiful, very something, right?

But a special someone basically means someone you have a very close relationship to.

So, your husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend is your special someone.

A family member, you can think of as someone special.

But your special someone is your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, etc.

Now, if you think about your head, it's at the top of your body, all the heat rises up, so maybe it's a little bit warm, but it's not hot.

When we say someone is hot-headed or, yeah, someone is hot-headed, that means that they get angry very easily.

If someone is hot-headed and you say the wrong thing to them, they will yell back at you, or they will get very angry, or they'll throw a chair against the wall, right?

What we also sometimes do say is a hot-head.

We can say someone is a hot-head, and we put the two words together to create a compound, and it's one word, hot-head.

Or, as an adjective, that person is hot-headed, right?

Now, very often when you go to a store, you can mix and match items.

So, a store will say, buy any five pieces for $20, right?

So, you can take one from this department, one from this department, and put them together.

Or, for example, clothing, especially let's say a bikini store.

You can take one bikini top that's this design, and another bikini bottom that's this design.

And this is a very common collocation, and it's very literal.

Mix the items and match the things that work well together.

You can also mix and match items at a restaurant, you can do it at any clothing store.

Basically, when you're going shopping, that's when you're going to see this particular collocation with MM, okay?

Now, this is a little bit harder to explain, and technically it's very straightforward, it's not really idiomatic.

If you think of cold, cold doesn't always mean like temperature.

A person can be cold, means like feeling cold, or a person could be cold meaning they don't have much warmth inside, they don't have a heart.

They think in terms of reason, not in terms of feelings.

So, you can say they're a little bit cold.

Maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but that's what people often think.

So, a person like that who always thinks with his or her head, basically he calculates everything in a very logical way.

This person does not think about how people are affected, this person doesn't think about consequences for other people, he or she thinks about his own needs, his own interests, okay?

So, everything that he does is based on a cold calculation.

It's very logical, very thought out, no feelings involved, okay?

So, again, if you think about governments, most governments are cold, I guess you could say.

When a government decides to go to war against another country, it's a very cold calculation.

Lots of people are going to die, but the government is thinking about the economy, it's thinking about oil, it's thinking about expanding its power.

So, it's only about cold, hard facts, not feelings, not caring really about other people.

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11 Stylish English Collocations: “feel free”, “crystal clear”, “special someone”...

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