Hi everybody, welcome back to Ask Alicia, the weekly series where you ask me questions and I answer them.

Maybe. Let's get to your first question this week. First question this week comes from Abdullah. Hi, Abdullah.

Abdullah asked, hi Alicia. How can I transfer a noun to a verb or an adjective in an easy way? Thanks in advance.

Okay, super interesting question. So I want to begin my answer to this by saying this isn't an official grammar rule, but this is something that we do all the time in English when we don't have just the right adjective to describe the situation. So first I want to talk about using nouns as adjectives or making a new adjective with a noun.

So to do this, we just put a Y at the end of the noun to make it into an adjective.

So an example of this, a super simple example of this that already exists,

is like if you want to take the noun cake and use it as an adjective, you can use the word

cakey. So the word cakey already exists, but the same concept applies here. So if I want

to talk about something that is cake-like, I can say that it is cakey. Like I might say,

oh no, my makeup is really cakey today. Or, uh-oh, the paint is looking really cakey right here.

So it is something that is like cake, in other words. So like my makeup is looking

cakey and maybe it looks like it's a little crumbly or the paint looks a little bit crumbly.

When we want to talk about something that is like cake, we just put why at the end.

In this case, the word cakey already exists, but this is kind of the

same idea that we carry into other nouns that we want to use as adjectives. So here's one that

doesn't actually exist. If I want to talk about clothing, like let's say my friend is wearing

something that looks really, really interesting, it's flowing at the bottom. And she's like,

oh, don't you like my new pants? And I'm like, oh, that's so interesting. Your pants looks so

skirty. So in my mind, the pants look like a skirt because they're very flowing, maybe long and

flowing. And she says, oh, these are pants. And I go, oh, I thought it was a skirt. But I want to express that it has the qualities of a skirt.

So I could use skirt-tie, skirt with a Y at the end,

as an adjective to express that.

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