Name: 10 English Idioms with Meanings You CAN’T Guess
Uploaded: 2026-03-04T18:17:11.000Z
Duration: 10 min 39 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...

To-infinitive

In today's video, I want to teach you a few expressions and some of them are actually idioms that people commonly use in everyday situations.

And as with most idioms and cultural expressions, if you.

If nobody explains to you what they mean, they're very difficult to guess at.

So I'm going to tell you what these 10 expressions mean and in what context you can probably use them.

Most of these you will not use in writing.

They're pretty informal, but they're good to know for everyday situations.

So we're going to start with to butter someone up.

If you're buttering someone up, you're flattering them very much, usually because you want something from them.

So you would butter up your boss, you would butter up your teacher, you would butter up a co worker and.

And then later you will ask for some sort of favour.

So if you think about a piece of bread and you put butter, you know, it's nice and smooth and soft, you're making them feel comfortable and tasty and whatnot.

So to flatter someone, to make them feel good about themselves, to run around like a chicken with its head cut off, it's a bit of a long expression.

everybody still knows what it means and it's very effective for the situation.

So if you think about a chicken, if you take a chicken and cut its head off, it will continue to run around on the ground even though there's no head.

But the problem without having the head is that it doesn't know where it's going.

So it's just going, you know, back and forth and all over the place.

So when we say this about a person, it's a person who's a little bit nervous and just running around, being very busy, but

without any sort of organization or any control.

So if somebody, let's say I'm having a party, my wife and I are having a party and we're getting near the time where people are supposed to arrive, but

And she's running around here and there and trying to do a little bit of everything, but

it's so disorganized that nothing is going, nothing's happening.

You're running around like a chicken with its head cut off.

As you finish, go to the next thing it will be much more effective.

Running around like a chicken with its head cut off gets you nowhere, right?

This makes other people nervous, actually.

The elephant in the room, or there is an elephant in the room.

If you think about a room like in your house, if you put an elephant in there, that elephant will be pretty obvious, I think, a little bit difficult to hide.

When there's a topic or a question or a problem that is very obvious to everybody in the room, everybody in the area, but

So somebody eventually will say, I think we need to discuss the elephant in the room.

And everybody will understand exactly what that the topic of that discussion needs to be.

So it's something that's very obvious, but everybody wants to avoid speaking about it.

It's usually something obviously not very pleasant.

That's why nobody wants to speak about it.

Basically, there's no point in repeating something.

So if somebody says, like somebody says to me, or my boss comes to me and says, you know, this report wasn't very good.

He goes, you know, because it's very important that this report is done properly.

He goes, because if this report is not done properly, we may lose the client.

And I say, okay, there's no point beating a dead horse.

You don't have to keep saying it and saying it and saying it, right?

So a dead horse, for example, when you say beat a dead horse, you hit the horse, so it goes forward.

But if a horse is dead and you hit it, it's not going to go forward.

And if you hit it again, it's not going to go forward.

Now, neck of the woods, Depending on who's saying it, you could say, oh, I heard you're from my neck of the woods.

So neck of the woods, basically, where are you from?

Usually it means your hometown or your origin.

So if somebody is talking about neck of the woods, like if you're in my neck of the woods, if you're in my area, come over.

I'm from your neck of the woods or my parents are from your parents neck of the woods.

So when somebody says this expression they mean too much or everything that's imaginable.

So let's say I'm going on vacation with my, with my wife, my girlfriend, whatever, and

We're going to just sit on a beach every day.

I need a bathing suit and I need some sunscreen.

My girlfriend on the other hand, packed a huge, huge suitcase plus a carry on plus another purse plus.

So I say to her, like you have everything but the kitchen sink in here.

Just pack smaller means you've packed too much.

Everything she could imagine she put in there, right?

It's actually a very common expression, surprisingly the best thing since sliced bread.

Now there's machines now when you go to the supermarket and you buy a loaf of bread, you can go to the person working there and they will put it in the machine and the machine slices it.

So you have sliced bread, you don't have to cut it yourself.

So this was a huge invention at its time because it saved people a lot of trouble.

It's again, it's a little bit exaggerating.

It's not really that big of an invention.

But we use this expression to say that something is really, really good.

Or we can use it to make fun of somebody who thinks he or she is really, really good.