Inching on

“Fukushima decommissioning inches on.”–The Yomiuri Shinbun.
I didn’t know that the word “inch” could be used in this way.
I feel that knowing every inch of the English language is very difficult. Learning a foreign language is like inching on forever.

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It’s a very common way to make new words, especially in the American version of English! =))

It’s called ‘conversion’ in lexicology implying that the word is literally converted from one part of speech into another by just changing its formal grammatic elements, mostly suffixes when it’s converted from noun into a verb! :wink:

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Greetings!
Come on Yutaka, with your 15000 known English words you have inched on already quite a bit.
Applied to the Fukushima site, one could expect grass and trees growing there by now!

With my 2 weeks of Russian and 200 words, I feel like I am snailing along, stuck to my tasty lettuce leaf of alphabet drills.
You keep whizzing ahead through the landscape, discovering every inch! :))
But one day I also will be reading Russian articles about Chernobyl, hehe!

“The North Sea will sooner be found in water than a woman at a loss for a word.”

Yutaka, being male, is at a disadvantage after all.

An inch was you for old measurements, it was called feet and inches. Sometime people still use feet and inch but it is common to use now a days ,centimetres and meters.

A common English saying is “Give them an inch, and they will take a mile”.
If you were in a traffic jam, and the car in front of you was moving forward slowly, that would be know as inching forward.