Name: Strange English Phrases We Actually Use! English Idioms and Sayings!
Uploaded: 2024-06-10T14:22:22.000Z
Duration: 10 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Future simple

So I have my scissors and I think I'll go for a run.

All right, we have this phrase in English, don't run with scissors, which simply means you shouldn't run when you have scissors because it's a little bit dangerous.

But we have a bunch of other phrases that when you first read them, at first glance, you might not know what they mean.

When you translate them literally, they might not make sense.

So in this English lesson, we'll look at a few of those phrases.

I'll try to act out the funny literal meaning and then I will explain to you what the actual meaning is of each of those phrases in English.

We have a saying in English, you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

And it doesn't mean that you can't teach a dog like Oscar new tricks.

What it actually means is you can't teach people who are old how to do new things.

It's hard to teach someone who really likes doing something a certain way to do it a new way.

So we use the English phrase, you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

But this dog, this might be a little easier.

And we think we might be able to teach this new dog some new tricks.

By the way, we thought Oscar needed a friend, so we got another dog.

No one can sit on this side of the couch because of this couch potato.

This potato is just always sitting on the couch doing nothing.

But that's not actually what the term couch potato means in English.

In English, when we say that a person is a couch potato, what we mean is that the person sits on the couch all day, they don't really do anything.

Maybe they just sit and endlessly watch one television show after another.

We would call that person a couch potato.

I'm definitely not a couch potato, but when I'm old and retired, I think I might be more of a couch potato.

So earlier I was doing some thinking inside this box and it wasn't going very well, so I thought I should stop and think outside the box.

So now I'm outside the box and I'll do a little bit more thinking.

But the English phrase to think outside the box has nothing to do with a box.

What it means when you say to someone, you need to think outside the box, is it means you want them to think differently about something.

Right now, students learn in classrooms and they sit in rows.

But if we think outside the box, students could also learn by watching YouTube videos or maybe by going outside or going on field trips.

So when you think outside the box, if at work your boss says, you need to think outside the box a little bit more, what they mean by that is they want you to have unique and different ideas.

They want you to think about things differently and come up with something that's just really cool and really awesome.

So I'm just trying to hold my horses right now.

But this isn't what the English phrase, hold your horses, actually means.

If someone says to you, hold your horses, they just want you to wait.

Sometimes when we're going somewhere, my kids all run out to the car really fast and I say, whoa, hold your horses.

We're not leaving for another 10 minutes.

So it doesn't mean to hold an actual horse.

It simply is something you say to someone when you want them to wait, when you want them to slow down a little bit.

I like to have all my ducks in a nice straight row.

But this isn't actually what the phrase to have your ducks in a row means.

When we say in English that you should have your ducks in a row, it means that you should be prepared or ready for something.

You should have your backpack and your books and a few pens and things to write with.

You should be prepared for the first day of school.

You should definitely have all your ducks in a row.

Sometimes when you're in a room full of people, it's hard to talk about certain things because of the elephant in the room.

The English term elephant in the room doesn't refer to an actual elephant.

But when we say it's hard to talk about certain things because of the elephant in the room, what we mean is that there's something that you just don't wanna talk about.

Maybe your brother and his wife got divorced, and that's a sensitive topic.

It's something that people don't like to talk about when they're all in the same room together.

We would refer to that situation as the elephant in the room.

It was hard to have a fun conversation because of the elephant in the room.

In that case, the elephant in the room is the fact that your brother and his wife are no longer together.

So in English, there's no actual elephant in the room when you use the phrase the elephant in the room.

You're simply talking about an uncomfortable situation that no one wants to talk about, and it kind of prevents normal fun conversation from happening.

Hey, we have an English phrase, don't count your chickens before they hatch, but I'm just ignoring it for now because I think if I count the number of eggs here, I'll know how many chickens hatch in a few weeks.

But the phrase don't count your chickens before they hatch has nothing to do with eggs or chickens.

When we say to someone, don't count your chickens before they hatch, what we're saying is don't think something is going to happen until it actually happens.

Let's say someone says to you, my boss is going to give me a raise next week.

Right now I make $17 an hour and my boss is going to give me a raise next week.

You might say to that person, hey, don't count your chickens before they hatch.

What you mean by that is don't think that that's going to happen until your boss actually tells you next week that you're getting a raise.

So don't count your chickens before they hatch has nothing to do with eggs.

It simply means don't get too excited about something until it actually happens.

So I had a job once where one of my coworkers was stealing money from work and then he got caught and the boss just gave him a slap on the wrist.

So a slap on the wrist is not actually a slap on the wrist.

When you do something bad and you are disciplined or punished for it, if the punishment is very, very light, we call it a slap on the wrist.

In the case of my coworker, the boss simply told him to stop stealing.

He didn't lose his job, nothing else happened.

The boss just gave him a bit of a slap on the wrist, a very light punishment.

That is definitely just a slap on the wrist.

If you look here, you can see that I have butterflies in my stomach for some reason.

But this isn't what the phrase to have butterflies in your stomach actually means.

If I was to say I have butterflies in my stomach, it means that I'm nervous about something.

If I knew that later today I had to talk in front of a thousand people, I would probably say, ooh, I'm a bit nervous.