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Hello and welcome to Interesting Idioms.
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Today we're going to look at a very common idiom and a very useful idiom for speaking.
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It's quite an easy one. It's very obvious to know what it means but
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it's very very good for your speaking. The idiom we're going to look at is this one:
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To make a long story short.
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Now this simply means 'to get to the point quickly', 'to leave out all the details and to jump to the ending'.
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So imagine you're talking to your friend in English and you have an interesting story
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but perhaps you don't have time to tell all the details you can just jump straight to the conclusion,
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you can use this idiom. You simply say: "to make a long
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story short we did this" or "to make a long story short this happened"
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so you jump straight to the ending, the point of your story. Now let's have a
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look at a couple of examples in use so it becomes much clearer for you.
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So I want you to imagine: this example is about a company CEO and he has no time to
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explain all the details.
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He just goes straight to the point. So he says or she says "the company is having serious problems at the moment
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to make a long story short it is in debt and we have to make staff cuts"
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So the CEO didn't go into all the details
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he or she simply went to the conclusion.
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He didn't say "this is why we're in debt
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this is what happened, these are the problems etc."
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He went straight to the point
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He had no time for the details
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so he used the idiom 'to make a long story short'
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Let's look at another example. This is two friends who went out and were separated
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and one friend is asking the other
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what happened. So Sam says where did you guys disappear to last night?
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And Mike says it was crazy to cut a long story short, we ended up going to a house party and
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stayed out till 6am. So you can see that Mick went straight to the conclusion.
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He didn't go into all the details of what happened.
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Also notice that there are two varieties of this idiom we can say to make a long
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story short or to cut a long story short. They both mean the same thing just two ways to express the same medium.
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Now when you leave out the details and go straight to the conclusion you can
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explain the details after.
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So you can explain the conclusion first and then go back to the details if you have time.
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So for example Mick might say to cut a long story short we ended up going to a
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house party and stayed out till 6am. Then he can go to the details. He might say we were walking along,
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we met a group of people and they were having fun and they said hey come back
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to our house and let's have a party.
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So he might explain the details after you see
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So there are two ways you can either leave the details completely or you can
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go back to them after if you have time and make sure you when you explain the conclusion try to explain it
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in as few words as possible get straight to the point.
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Ok you can go into the details after if you wish.
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So if you have any questions leave them in the comments section below.
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Hit the thumbs up button and thanks for watching. See you in the next video.