Enough

A student recently said, "I don't have enough score on TOEFL," in class. What's wrong with this? "Enough" can be used for both countable and non-countable nouns, so that's not the problem.


The problem is the word choice of the noun. "Score" is not correct; "points" is correct. So "I don't have enough points on TOEFL (to apply to an MBA program など)," is what he meant to say.


Mike Guest wrote about this kind of mistake in a newspaper a few years ago. I found the article here, if you are interested. It's technically known as a lexico-grammar problem, which basically means, "The word "score" doesn't mean what you think it means."


So when you are working on your English vocabulary, please remember that you need to learn both (1) the meaning and (2) the usage （使い方）.


Please use English well!