I. Grammar

Word formation: -something and -odd

In informal English, we can add -something after thirty, forty, fifty etc to indicate the appropriate age of someone. Thus a person aged between 40 and 49 is forty-something. Similarly, you can add -odd after a number to indicate that the number is approximate. So there were fifty-odd people at the party, most of them thirty-something.

Examples:

1. Lots of my forty-something friends seem to be taking a leaf out of the Blairs, book on birth control and squeezing out a last-minute baby.…while my world was expanding and new options were opening for me, my father was seeing his world shrink and his options narrow.

2. There are about twenty-odd people waiting in the corridor outside.