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Hold your own
Phrase: Hold your own Sustained forward motion. That’s what we are all looking for. It’s hard to do, though. Sometimes, the best we can hope for is to hold our own. To hold your own means to remain strong in the face of a challenging situation. Then again, sometimes, holding your own is more than…
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While away
Phrase: While away Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are whiling away their time doing things they never had time for before. Cooking, baking, eating, board games, puzzles, YouTube, Zoombombing, binging on Netflix, Hulu, Udemy, Skillshare, reading ArtisanEnglish.jp posts, dancing all by my/yourself in the living room – HEY, don’t judge – cabin fever is…
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Put into practice
Phrase: Put into practice So, talk is cheap. No, wait, I’ve done that one before. What’s today’s post? Oh, yeah, put into practice. If you put something into practice, you make your dream, idea, or words a reality. OK, talk is still cheap. That’s why when you talk a good game, you have to put…
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More power to you
Phrase: More power to you Failure. It’s a scary word for some people. The thing is that it shouldn’t be. Failure is a sign that you are learning, or at least you should be. We should never condemn someone for something they have attempted and experienced a setback or outright failure. Instead, we should encourage…
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On a mission
Phrase: On a mission If you are a man, take my advice. Never, ever get in the way of a woman on a mission. If you are not on her side, she will run you over like a fully loaded freight train at top speed and not even look back. I remember two instances when…
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Throw in the towel
Idiom: Throw in the towel As an English teacher, I have the opportunity to meet all kinds of people. My job revolves around success, not big successes like landing ￥1,000,000 contracts, but little ones like placing an article in the right location in a sentence. Life, in general, is built on small achievements. Unfortunately, not…
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But for
English Phrase: But for Here we are. We have a coordinating conjunction and a preposition – two of my students’ least favourite things in the entire world. Now, I have to explain how to use these two highly disliked things together as a phrase. I’ve put off writing this one. Now it is the last…
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Turn on its head
Idiom: Turn on its head Oh, no! Everything as we knew it has been turned on its head. Things we thought were constants no longer exist, and things we thought would never exist now seem to be the norm. At least the toilet paper fiasco appears to be sorting itself out. You know, up until…
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A run
WotD: A run (on something) Have you ever seen so many people move so fast in your life? Who knew toilet paper was so important? This pandemic has created an urgent need for many things, but toilet paper shocked everyone. There has been a worldwide run on toilet paper that has made it as rare…
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A different beast
Idiom: A different beast Good day there. How are you holding up? At the risk of sounding patronizing and stating the obvious, I’ll say the world is a different place. We can go so far as to say the world now is a different beast. In simple terms, the idiom, a different beast, means something…
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