Took this after lunch
yesterday. (Since its a long weekend =p)Notice the 1st sentence "We will be closed for business on Sunday....." I feel that it should be "We will be closed on Sunday..." without "for business" as the shop cannot be closed for business. Feel free to comment!
Selamat Hari Raya to all and happy holidays! =)
Kar Yan
Hi Kar Yan,
ReplyDeleteThat's a really interesting point. "Closed for business" is such a common expression that few of us think twice about it. I agree that it doesn't seem to make much sense for something to be closed "for business".
Just out of curiosity, I checked out several corpora available online. A corpus (plural: corpora) is a large collection of authentic texts in electronic form, searchable through something called a concordancer. The British National Corpus has over 100 million words of real language stored in it, and when I typed in "open for business", there were 40 examples. When I typed in "closed for business", there were 3. I did the same thing with another corpus of Time Magazine articles. There were 67 hits for "open for business" and none for "closed for business".
If you're interested, check out the corpora yourselves at: http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/ and http://corpus.byu.edu/time/
R Tang.
Hi Dr Tang,
ReplyDeleteWow. Thanks for the info! Will take a look at it! =)
Kar Yan