蜜芽传媒 World Service | Learning English

'Count Dracula, still hungry'

A question from Valerie de Lammeville, an English teacher in France:

My mind has been beset by a question for a great many years. Indeed when I studied English at university, I once made a mistake which was not really explained to me by our teacher.

The sentence we had to translate was the following: il 茅tait un peu ivrogne = he was something of a drunkard.

If I've got it right, you need something of a + a noun...?
'Something of a' (or somewhat) means 'a little'. But a little has to be followed by an adjective.


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Susan Fearn answers:
Yes Valerie, you're right to say that something of a is followed by a noun and here are a couple more examples:

She seemed to be something of an expert on wine.
He claimed to be something of a linguist.

And this expression something of a means 'to some extent'.

Now a few years ago, one British politician was describing a colleague she didn't seem to like much and she said:

"There was something of the night about him."

In other words, like a vampire, like Dracula, who only went out at night, he went around frightening people! After that, cartoonists often drew this politician with big Dracula teeth and a black cloak!

In style terms, my feeling about this expression is that it's a little bit formal -perhaps more written than conversational -perhaps a little bit old-fashioned even.

Now you also ask about the expression a little + an adjective - for example:

He felt a little tired so he went to bed.
Or
She was a little confused, so she asked the teacher for an explanation.

Now this also means 'to some extent'. If you want a word that sounds a bit closer to 'something', you could also use 'somewhat' and it would have the same meaning:

He felt somewhat tired.
She was somewhat confused.

...but this does sound, well... how shall I put it? ...somewhat formal.

So what do we say in everyday spoken English then?
Well, the answer is a bit. And the wonderful thing about a bit is that you can use it with both nouns and adjectives.

With nouns, it's a bit of:

He's a bit of a drunkard.
or...
She's a bit of a wine expert.

The other day a friend of mine was describing her new boss and she said:
"Well he's alright but he's a bit of a Jack the lad."
What she meant was, he has a lot of girlfriends!

When we use 'a bit' before an adjective, there's no 'of':

He was a bit tired.
She was a bit angry.

So before a noun then, it's a bit of
and before an adjective, a bit.

Apart from learning some useful expressions here, I think two points come out of this.
First of all, we tend to learn English in 'chunks' - for example, you learn the expression something of followed by a noun with its special meaning. And secondly, it's good to be aware that some expressions are more or less formal and up-to-date than others. For example a bit sounds conversational whereas somewhat sounds a bit stiff and formal.

Susan Fearn has taught English in Europe, Japan and China and has made programmes for 蜜芽传媒 Learning English in the past. She is currently teaching English for Journalism and Public Relations at the University of Westminster in London.

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