Teacher Discussion Forums

Ah... the native speaker arrogance... I corrected a student of mine who consistently referred to health as healthiness. i.e. "You can work there if you have good healthiness" - which just sounds so wrong. She swore she had seen it in a dictionary, I said that was impossible. But I cannot find a site or entry in a dictionary to prove it, in fact, she seems to be right - healthiness is referred to as a synonym to health everywhere I look. Am I crazy? Help!

There are only two references in the Collins Concordance and Collocations Sampler, so the term is pretty rare, although your student is right to say it exists.

Synonymous? I don't think so; whoever heard of a "Healthiness Minister", or healthiness farm"? It doesn't seem to collocate in most contexts. You were absolutely right to correct her; she's using the term in contexts where, it appears, native speakers wouldn't use it, so it's wrong even though it's theoretically possible.

The top 5 collocates with health (excluding "and") are: care, sevice, authority, mental, education. You won't be able to give your student a grammatical reason why you can't say healthiness care or the National Healthiness Sevice, but the fact is that native speakers simply don't say them. "It sounds wrong" is a perfectly good explanation - it sounds like your student needs to learn about collocations.

Thanks!