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Have egg on your face
Phrase: Have egg on your face In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins gives Gollum a riddle. A box without hinges, key, or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid. It took Gollum a few minutes to figure it out, but eventually, he got it. The answer is eggs. Eggs are beautiful things with a…
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Dig your heels in
English Phrase: Dig your heels in Digging your heels in is not always a sign of stubbornness. I need to make that point clear before we go any further. To dig your heels in means to refuse to change something, such as your ideas, thoughts or plans, especially when someone else is trying to convince…
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Turn up like a bad penny
English Phrase: Turn up like a bad penny The things and people you don’t like always seem to show up unexpectedly in places you’d prefer they didn’t. I tell you, it’s uncanny. If you want an example, here’s one. Imagine you are out celebrating a wedding anniversary with your husband. There you are, expecting a…
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Try your hand at something
Phrase: Try your hand at something Happy New Year, everyone! Yes, I know it’s a little late, but better late than never, as the adage goes. So, here we are in the big 2020, that’s twenty-twenty for those of you who don’t know how to read it in English. In the Western world, January is…
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Be my guest
English Phrase: Be my guest Although it may be simple enough, the little phrase be my guest has multiple uses in various situations. As in the picture, if you want to invite someone to stay the night, you can say be my guest. It’s a polite little way to say go ahead, knock yourself out…
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Snowball effect
Word of the Day: The snowball effect Well, isn’t this timely? Winter is the best time of year to talk about snowballs, and by pure coincidence, I’ve chosen the snowball effect for my post today. Now, I could wax nostalgic about building snow forts, igloos and tunnelling through huge snowbanks when I was a kid,…
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Be no angel
Phrase: Be no angel In the old Westerns, the bad guys wore black hats, and the good guys wore white ones. However, real life is not so black and white. (heh) Everyone, no matter how ‘good’ or ‘angelic’ they are, has times when they are no angel. What that means is there are times when…
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Asking for trouble
English Phrase: Asking for trouble Sometimes, the things we do are nothing but asking for trouble. To be asking for trouble means to be doing something that is going to get you into trouble. Often, it’s something stupid and foolish. Whether it’s intentional or not, we humans are often our own worst enemies. I can’t…
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Lifehack
Word of the Day: Lifehack Some students asked about the meaning of lifehack after it came up in one of the articles for the Adaptability Quotient lesson. Lifehacks are quite popular now because of the busy, time-constrained lifestyles everyone seems to live. Any little trick, tool, or strategy you can adopt to better manage your time…
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Eyes bigger than your belly
English Idiom: Eyes bigger than your belly Food waste is a massive challenge in Western countries. One of the leading causes of this waste is that our eyes are bigger than our bellies. For example, did you know that Japan wastes 3.3 million tons of food every year? Most, if not all, of that food…
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