Name: English Tutor Nick P Word Origins (76) Slowpoke
Uploaded: 2019-10-07T03:54:53.000Z
Duration: 3 min 40 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...

Hi this is Tutor Nick P and this is Word Origins 76. The word origin today is

Past simple

slowpoke. All right.  I don't know if anybody ever wondered where do we get

The imperative

slowpoke from. Obviously it means a very slow person. We know slow. The slow makes

a lot of sense,  but why do we say slowpoke ? I mean did we did we poke people

with our finger that was slow. Hey,  you why are you so slow ?   So anyway in this video I'm going to try to explain where slowpoke came from anyway

Let's take a look at the note here. If we say that someone is a slowpoke,

we mean that he or she is a person that moves very slowly or takes a very

long time to do a particular thing. I remember when I was a kid,  I think kids

actually use it even more,  but even adults do. We sometimes kind of....

We use it in a humorous way to tell somebody "Oh my God !  Why are you so slow ?

Hurry up." All right. Let's continue.  The earliest known citing is from John

Russell Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms.You know. like American

slang or  idioms. Things like that,  Americanisms. The British also have a

term slowcoach which is used in the same way. So Americans say slowpoke. The  British

say slowcoach. Okay. Let's continue. The origin of slowpoke is believed to come

from an old use of the meaning of poke that is no longer used today. So that's

why we don't recognize it anymore. Poke used to have a meaning of  to dawdle

away. Which means to waste time and move very slowly. So that's really where it

came from.  Even in our present time,  we still use

the adjective "pokey" and that could be spelt with with an "E" and without an "E."

Not the most common adjective,  but it's we it's still in the dictionary and it is

still used. All right and all right. And really that also this pokey means moving

very slowly in an annoying way. And actually slowpoke sometimes is annoying

that they're moving that slowly. All right.  Let's just look at three examples for

the way we often might hear it today.  I don't want Jack to be on our team,  he

is such a slowpoke. Yeah. This could be perfectly heard like with kids playing

you know,  maybe they don't want a certain other kid to be on the team. You know,

because maybe he runs too slowly. So we often called somebody that ran too

slowly a slowpoke too.  All right. Here's the second example.  I am stuck on this single-

lane road. Yeah. Basically behind a driver who is a slowpoke. Okay. Yeah. We

sometimes all felt that way when we're driving and you have this driver in

front of you and he's just going at maybe below the speed limit. And maybe

you can't get around and you don't want to go to the other side of the road or

maybe there is no other side of the road.  So you might hear,  especially a driver

with road rage saying , " Oh my god ! This driver is such a slowpoke. " Okay. Good and

let's read the third one here. Example number three. My God ! You are a slowpoke.

How long is it going to take you to finish this project ? Okay. Good. Anyway, I

hope you got it. I hope  it was clear. I  hope was informative. Thank you for your time.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

English Tutor Nick P Word Origins (76) Slowpoke

stick

recognize

present

basically