The vocabulary of fraud, business crime, and scams

This post is about fraud of one type or another. Through several exercises we look first at the vocabulary of business crime, also known as white-collar or financial crime, and then at the world of scams.

Confusing words - Relations, relatives and relationships

These three nouns often have very similar meanings, but are sometimes used in slightly different ways. Judging by the number of questions asked about them on forums, learners can find them quite confusing. In fact I think it's even difficult for a native speaker to explain the difference; we just trust our instincts. So let's try to work them out.

Video lesson - The Long Johns and the Subprime Crisis

This video lesson will be of particular interest to students of Business and Financial English, or just to anyone who likes good satire

The US subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 was one of the first indicators of the late-2000s financial crisis, characterized by a rise in delinquencies and foreclosures among subprime mortgage borrowers. (Wikipedia)

Subprime mortgages were primarily given to Black people (BrE), Afro-Americans (AmE), many of whom suffered considerably as a consequence. The collapse of very complicated financial instruments based on these loans in part led to the crisis of 2008.

A satirical video featuring the actors John Bird and John Fortune, also known as the Long Johns, is often seen as one of the most accurate analyses as to what went wrong. It is done as an interview with an investment banker (who looks very pleased with himself). It is very funny (in an intelligent way) and if you complete all the exercises before you watch, the dialogue shouldn't be too difficult. You might want to print off the exercises to look at while you watch the video.

Idioms from Horse racing and betting - explanation and quizzes

Horse racing is a very popular spectator sport in the UK and Ireland, and has a very long history. There are currently about sixty race-courses in the UK, with two or three meetings happening on any given day. People don't of course watch the 'gee-gees' out of a simple love of animals, but because it involves betting on the horses, in other words gambling. If you walk into a 'bookies' (bookmakers shop) in the UK, the screens will be dominated by horse racing.

Horse racing, and more particularly the betting associated with it, has given a lot of idioms to the English language, especially in the areas of probability, risk and competition. They are therefore used a lot in business. Let's take a look.

Racecard - Erewhon 14.30 'Happy Humbugs' Handicap Hurdle

No.	Name of horse	Form	Weight	Bet
1	Fine and dandy	2351-52	11-4	3/1
2	Finnegan’s Wake	2/61-P31	10-14	4/1
3	Lucky Blighter	122121	11-10	3/5
4	Captain Bennett	PP-4286	10-6	25/1
5	Greased lightning	167723	11-0	4/1

This is an (invented) racecard typical of those you will find on the website of a racing newspaper such as the Racing Post or the Sporting Life, although I've left out certain information such as the names of the jockey, trainer and the owner. The first thing we are going to look at is the bets column on the right.

Loop back to me and we'll touch base about this offline.

While teaching at a large bank recently, I started talking about business jargon, and more precisely business buzzwords. I said that for many native-speakers, this sort of language can be incomprehensible, sound pretentious or just sound plain ugly.

In the UK many employees say they feel cut off from management, as they haven’t a clue what management are talking about. [1]. It has got so bad that the government has even sent out a list of ‘forbidden words’ to local councils. [2]