Name: 15 PHRASAL VERBS with meanings you can’t guess!
Uploaded: 2025-07-19T22:43:57.000Z
Duration: 13 min 33 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...

In today's video, I'm going to teach you some more phrasal verbs, but these are a little bit tricky because we're going to look at some eating phrasal verbs.

These include food items or food cooking techniques, but the meanings of the phrasal verbs have nothing to do with food or eating, so they're a little bit confusing that way, but they're kind of interesting and very important to know because we use all of these in regular, everyday English situations.

On this side, I've listed food items, things that you can eat, like beef, chicken, fish, duck, clam, veg is short for vegetables, or milk that you can drink.

And here, we have eating situations, eating actions, or cooking actions.

So, you can chew or you can swallow, so you chew your food and then you swallow it.

You can boil, cut, or use a pan in your cooking, but when we look at the meanings of these phrasal verbs, none of them have anything to do with food or cooking or eating or anything like that, so very interesting to know.

It has nothing to do with cows or bulls or the beef you have in your hamburger or in your stew.

On a personal meaning, if a person wants to beef up, he or she wants to get bigger, more muscles.

Usually, it could be muscles or it could just be gaining weight, but most people who go to the gym and work out a lot and get bigger and bigger muscles, they are beefing up.

But you can also beef up something like security.

So, the police will beef up security when the president comes to visit.

That means increase or put more police officers or sort of agents all over the city to make sure there's stronger and more security apparatus, okay?

And if you think about a chicken, if you go try to catch a chicken, it will run away.

It means to be afraid and not do something at the last minute.

So, let's say there's a group of friends and we go to the sea, and there's a big cliff.

And from the cliff, you can jump a very long way down into the water.

So, we have five friends, and the first one jumps and lands in the water, and he's okay.

The fifth one, the fifth friend comes to the edge of the cliff and looks down, gets very scared and decides to walk down to the water.

He changed his mind because he was scared.

He didn't do the jump because he was scared.

So, fish, basically when you go fishing, you take your pole in the water and you're trying to find something, you're trying to catch something.

When you fish through some things, files or containers or boxes, you're looking for something, right?

It doesn't... you don't necessarily need to know what you're looking for, but you're looking for something specific and you hope that you'll be able to find it.

So, you're fishing through the container, you're fishing through the file, hoping to find something that you need, hoping to catch it.

So, similar to going fishing in the sea, you're fishing for something in a box, in a file.

So, duck, again, very delicious meat, but that's not what we're talking about here.

When you duck down means you're bending down because something is coming at you.

So, if a ball is flying at you, like in a baseball game, and somebody says, duck, and you duck down means you avoid the ball hitting you in the head.

If you're at a party and you're maybe a little bit bored or you don't like the people there or you just want to go home and sleep, but you don't want everybody to notice, you duck out of the party.

So, duck out of the party, the room, the office, etc.

You can duck out of the office so the boss doesn't see you leaving.   A clam is like a little shellfish, and it looks like this, and then it opens up in the water and it comes and there's a little meat inside.

Again, very delicious, but it's also a living thing.

If you clam up, which is a little strange because a clam, like, opens and closes its shell.

When it's up, it's open, but when we say to clam up, it means to shut the mouth.

So, if somebody clams up, they stop talking.

They become very shy or very nervous and they don't say anything because they don't want to make a mistake or they don't want to embarrass themselves, whatever the situation.

If you tell someone, clam up, which is a little bit old-fashioned, people don't really say anymore, it basically means shut up.

Older people might still say it, like, older teachers might say it to little kids, but a little bit old-fashioned.

We usually talk about a person's reaction.

So, a teacher called the student, and the student was very nervous and clammed up.

Just didn't speak and didn't say anything, didn't do anything.

So, to veg out means to relax, to stay at home on your couch and do nothing, maybe watch TV.

To milk someone or something for something else means to try to squeeze something out of someone.

Like, if you think about a con artist, like a person who cheats people for money.

This con artist will try to milk his victim for all the money they have.

He will try to squeeze all their money out of them.

You squeeze the udders, trying to get all the milk out.

If you have a person, like a victim, and you're trying to cheat them for money, you squeeze all the money out of them.

My boss is on vacation, so I will milk the time he's away for all the pleasure I can get.

So, I'm not going to work too hard because the boss can't see anything.

I will milk the situation and just relax for a couple of weeks.

You put the food in your mouth, you break it down with your teeth.

But if you chew over something, you're thinking about it.

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15 PHRASAL VERBS with meanings you can’t guess!

situation

basically

consequence

scene