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  • Hi this is Tutor Nick P and this is Idioms 249. The idiom today is to go belly up.

  • Okay. Let's take a look at the note here. We

  • actually have three different definitions. The first one is to fail or

  • go bankrupt. Yeah. We often use it for businesses going bankrupt or going out

  • of business. We say that they've gone belly-up. All right. It could be

  • breakdown, malfunction, die or fall apart. So it could be you know. machines or some

  • building. So any one of them could be breaking down, malfunctioning, dying or

  • falling apart. We could also say that that machine or that car went belly-up.

  • You could use it in that situation. Number three here. To have a disastrous

  • or undesirable outcome. So a bad result very , very bad result. All right. Let's

  • continue here. The idea of this ...of this idiom comes from the idea of a dead

  • animal found lying on its back with its stomach or belly facing upwards or the

  • way a dead fish floats in the water. Yeah I'm sure you've seen some bugs like this,

  • especially if you put down some poison or you might have seen this with

  • cockroaches. I think if you put down some baking soda or something and they eat

  • the baking soda that happens to them or or some other bugs where you know, they

  • died they turned around and they're lying belly-up. So that's the... that's

  • where the idea of this idiom actually comes from. All right. Let's continue here.

  • Let's give several examples. So example number one. After the dot-com bubble

  • burst you know, that was around the early 2000s, many early Internet companies went

  • belly-up. So they went out of business or they

  • went bankrupt. They failed. That's what we would mean. All right number two. His

  • dream of being a singer went belly-up when he got eliminated in the first

  • round of that American Idol contest. Yeah. Again maybe this was somebody who

  • thought they had some talent. They realized they didn't. So it was a bad

  • outcome or an undesirable outcome for him. Maybe it kind of crushed his dream. All

  • right number three. Many record stores went belly-up after it became popular to

  • download songs from the Internet. It didn't all happen in a day, but really in

  • about five years or six years many of them more already starting to go very...

  • just go out of business. So just go bankrupt. Just, just closed up. It wasn't

  • worth it. They weren't making enough profit. So again they failed or they went

  • bankrupt. They went out. All right and the last one here. His goal of being a

  • professional football player went belly-up after he had a career-ending

  • injury. Yeah. This happens to a lot of these college players. Sometimes they

  • think they might have a career. You know a good chance of making it

  • professional. But it doesn't you know, even if it in

  • college, you could have a career-ending injury. If you know you fell the wrong

  • way or you ended up at the bottom of a pile of football players on top of you.

  • You never know or just hit the wrong way. You can have a career-ending injury and

  • that's it your your dream is gone. Okay. Anyway I hope you got it. I hope it was clear.

  • Thank you for your time. Bye-bye.

Hi this is Tutor Nick P and this is Idioms 249. The idiom today is to go belly up.

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