Hi everybody, welcome back to Ask Alicia, the weekly series, Where Are You? Ask Me Questions and I answer them.

Maybe. Let's get to your first question this week. First question this week comes from Novas. Hi, Novas. Novas asked, how do I use the word mention? Is it the same as say? Okay, interesting question. So first, no, they're not the same. But let's break down the differences

between these two verbs. We're going to talk about mention and say as verbs here. So first,

when we use say, we usually use it to report speech. For example, my coworker said, or my friend said, that's in past tense, or we might use it in

present tense as well. Like, my professor always says or my parents always say, right? So when we

want to report speech, we can use say to do that. Now, let's compare this to mention. The idea with mention is that we are

talking about something, often we are talking about something we talked about in the past,

or we are talking about something kind of quickly. It might not be the main point, but we need

to include it in some way.

So there is some overlap in usage between mention and say, but we cannot use the two interchangeably.

So for example, we might say, my professor mentions in class a lot, blah, blah, blah,

or, oh, my mom mentioned that last week, which means

that, yes, my mom said something last week. But we would not use mention in the same way that we

use say to report speech. We wouldn't say, for example, like, my friend mentioned blah, blah, blah to me.

Grammatically, that would not be correct.

So although there is some overlap in how we can use mention and say,

in that both of them are used to talk about something that someone explained to us,

we cannot always use them interchangeably.

The idea with mention is often that like something

is kind of a little detail of information or it's not the main focus of the thing that we want to

explain. So let's compare two example sentences. Let's compare my friend said she was going to the party.

And my friend mentioned that she was going to the party.

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