Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[stevenukd]

Dear Teachers,

1. I�m the middle child in a family of four.
- �middle child� here means �the second child� or �third child�?

2. It makes me mad that my younger sister has to be miss popular in my family all the time.
- �miss popular� means �very important person�, right?

Thanks a lot to Teachers,

Stevenukd

[2006]

1...It doesn't mean either one; you cannot have a middle child of four children. You cannot say "family of four" because "family" includes the parents.
You can only have a middle child if there are an odd number of children, and then you can say things like I'm the middle child of five (children) or I'm the middle (one) of five children.

2...It doesn't mean "very important person". It means most popular.

[redset]

'Miss popular' is a name you might give to a girl (or woman) as a kind of description of their popular status - you could use it in a friendly way ('she's Miss Popular at school!' - meaning she has a lot of friends or is well liked) or a negative way ('Miss Popular here is too busy to hang out with us this weekend'). You could also use it in a sarcastic way, referring to an unpopular girl as Miss Popular. You could make up other names in this way to describe a person: Mr Smooth, Miss Jealousy etc.

In your sentence it sounds like the author is annoyed that their younger sister wants to be popular all the time, perhaps by never causing trouble and leaving it to the other siblings to complain or bring up difficult issues. She may be unsupportive so that the rest of the family never has a reason to dislike her. Or maybe she just likes to be the centre of attention!