10. Lose/ Miss/ Waste

Use each of these verbs once to complete the gaps 

• I can’t believe we ____our flight yesterday.
• We were late because we ____a lot of time scraping ice off the car.
• Every day, she ____so much time scrolling on social media.

The first one should be “missed.” 

I can’t believe we missed our flight yesterday

The second should be “lost.”

We were late because we lost a lot of time scraping ice off the car.

The third should be “wastes.” 

Every day, she wastes so much time scrolling on social media.

Let’s look at “lose” and “miss” as a pair first.

We use “miss” when we are or we arrive too late for something.

We miss - trains/buses/planes/the start of films/deadlines

• We missed the beginning of the film because we missed the bus.

“Lose” isn’t used with this meaning. But “lose time” and “waste time” can both be correct. And if you look in learner’s dictionaries, you’ll often see “waste” defined as “lose” and vice versa. There is a lot of crossover, but sometimes, one is more appropriate than the other.

Here’s something I hear a lot:

• She loses a lot of time on social media. ❌

What they really mean is:

• She wastes a lot of time on social media. ✅

If you waste time, you use your time badly. There’s a sense that you are in control of how you spend your time and you choose to do something unproductive. Another example:

• Don’t waste time arguing with him; he’s already made up his mind. (Don’t spend your time doing something unproductive.)

You can also say it’s a waste of time.

We’ll look at our example sentence with “lose” again.

• We were late because we lost a lot of time scraping ice off the car/

Were they using their time badly when they were scraping ice off the car? No, it was a productive thing to do! You can’t see if your car’s covered in ice.

If you lose time, time is taken away from you, perhaps because of delays, problems or accidents. The situation is often out of your control. Here’s another example: 

• We lost time when the computer system crashed and had to be restarted.

Let’s see a couple of pairs of sentences to cement the difference.

• They lost time during the meeting because the video link kept cutting out. (This was out of their control.)
• They wasted time discussing things that weren’t on the agenda. (This was within someone’s control.)
• We lost half an hour during the flight due to turbulence.
• The passengers wasted 10 minutes complaining instead of trying to rebook their missed flight.

11. Compound adjectives

• It’s a two hours drive. ❌
• It’s a two-hour drive. ✅

This first one is a bit tricky because they are actually two mistakes! “Two hours” describes the drive – it’s an adjective.

Do we pluralize adjectives in English? – No

We remove the -s. And in writing, we should have a hyphen between two and hour.

You can say “The drive takes two hours.” Two hours is a noun phrase here, not an adjective.

Here are some similar mistakes many students have made in the past:

• That’s a five minutes walk away. ❌
• That’s a five-minute walk away. ✅

 

• We had a three weeks holiday in Spain. ❌
• We had a three-week holiday in Spain. ✅

 

• I’ve got a fifty pounds note. ❌
• I’ve got a fifty-pound note. ✅

We don’t pluralize an adjective when we describe things like duration, distance, or amount, no matter how high the number goes.