لغات

10,000 HOUR RULE

CONVERSATIONAL VOCABULARY

Hi everyone. Aaron here. I’m now going to talk about some of the words and phrases that Dan and I used in our conversation about outliers. Let’s get started.

1. on my grind The very first one is ‘on my grind’. Dan asked me how I’m doing and I said, “Well, I’ve been on my grind recently.” ‘To be on your grind’ means to be very, very focused on work, on the daily tasks, either related to your job or to your life, the routines in your life. So when you are on your grind, it means you’re really focused on your work and on getting things done in your life from the moment you wake up in the morning until the moment you lie down to go to sleep at night. So if you’re on your grind, you’re really busy, you’re really focused, you’re really working hard.

You can also ‘grind’, meaning to work hard. We can say ‘on your grind’ or ‘grind’. I’m grinding. Are you grinding? Now, be careful because this is a very colloquial phrase, a very colloquial verb and you won’t hear it in business settings or in a classroom. You’re going to hear it in the street or in a very casual setting and it’s not that common. So be careful when using it.

2. pay the rent The next one is ‘pay the rent’. Dan asked me, “What’s the secret to your success?” And I say, “Well, I’m just trying to pay the rent and make good things happen in the world.” We’re just goofing around, Dan and I. ‘To pay the rent’ means to work, to make money to live on. So when you live in an apartment and you don’t own the apartment, every month you need to pay the landlord the rent money. So ‘to pay the rent’, when you’re trying to pay the rent, it means you’re trying to work to make money.

Another way of saying that is ‘make a living’ or ‘to bring home the bacon’. Who brings home the bacon in your house? Who pays the rent where you live? What are you doing to pay the rent? “What are you doing to pay the rent?” “I’m just trying to pay the rent. I’m working two jobs. I’m trying to pay the rent. I’m trying to make enough money to live on.” 3. put in Let’s go to the next one, ‘put in’. This is a phrasal verb, ‘put in’. Dan says if you want to be successful, you got to work hard and you got to be talented, but there’s a distinction between not just working hard but putting in the hours.

So ‘to put in the hours’ means to spend lots of time doing something. You have to put in the hours if you want to be successful. You have to put in the effort if you want to achieve something. You have to put in the work, put in the hard work if you want to achieve your goals or if you want to make your dreams come true, you’ve got to put in the hard work and effort.

So notice things like time, effort, work, come after ‘put in’ and it means to spend, to spend all that time, to spend all that effort. ‘To put in’. What do you spend your time doing? How many hours do you put in in your job each week? And how much effort do you put in to your job? These are ways that you can use the phrasal verb ‘put in’.

4. conversely Let’s move on. I think the next one is ‘conversely’. I’m talking about learning non-frequently used vocabulary words and how that’s not really going to help your fluency, and Dan says, or conversely, you can use all these grammar rules, you can learn all these grammar rules but you don’t have a wide enough range of words to actually be able to communicate something. So we’re talking about two extremes here and they’re kind of opposite. One is learning lots and lots of vocabulary and the other is knowing grammar rules but not knowing enough vocabulary. So this is kind of the opposite, and when you have two different opposite situations, you can use this connective term, ‘conversely’. It connects the discussion between the two.

Let me give you an example. Some people look like really good people on the outside, but on the inside they’re actually quite mean and they might cheat you or lie to you or steal from you.

Conversely, some people look like mean, scary people on the outside, but actually in fact, they’re very kind and gentle on the inside. So that’s the converse. One is the converse of the other. It’s the opposite of the other. So if you’re talking about something that has two opposites, you can link your discussion with ‘conversely’.

5. rack up Let’s move on to the next one, ‘rack up’. Here’s another phrasal verb which is useful. We’re talking about racking up hours. I’m talking about if you worked, let’s say a 40-hour workweek and you work 50 weeks out of the year, you’d rack up about 2,000 hours in one year. You’d rack up 2,000 hours.

It just means to accumulate, accumulate in large amounts.

A rack is actually something that contains things that you want to store. Imagine you are working in a restaurant and you have glasses that need to be washed. They often put those in racks. So you put maybe 24 glasses in one rack and you put that rack through a dishwasher and when it comes out the other end, you can stack all these racks on top of each other. So you can actually wash hundreds and hundreds of glasses in a restaurant by putting them in racks and stacking those racks on top of each other in order for the glasses to dry.

When you rack something, you accumulate, when you rack it up. So we usually talk about racking up time. You’re racking up hours. Another common use is racking up points like in a game, for example. I know a guy, he’s number one in this particular video game and he racked up five million points. So ‘to rack up’ means to accumulate in large amounts.

6. bristled Let’s move on to the next one, ‘bristled’. We’re talking about how you definitely need talent in addition to all the hard work if you want to be great at something. Dan says when Paul McCartney heard about this 10,000-hour rule being applied to the Beatles, and of course Paul McCartney was a Beatle, he bristled at the idea of this and saying that yeah, there are many bands that put in 10,000 hours but how many of them achieved the greatness of the Beatles. So you have to have talent. He bristled at that idea.

‘To bristle’ means to kind of get annoyed, get a little angry at something. Actually, ‘bristle’ is the hair on an animal skin or the hair on a man’s face. We can call that bristle. When an animal is very afraid or very angry, very scared or very excited, the hair can stand up. ‘To bristle’.

So ‘to bristle’ is the idea of the hair being very prickly, very sharp and standing up. So if someone gets angry suddenly at something, they can bristle. I just have this image of the hair on a pig’s back standing up when the pig is very excited or scared or angry.

People can bristle, too. Have you bristled at anything recently? Or what causes you to bristle? What causes you to get angry? 7. that’s a whole ‘nother story Let’s move on to the next one, ‘that’s a whole ‘nother story’. We’re joking at the end of the conversation and Dan’s talking about one of my hobbies being tap dancing and juggling, which is a joke, of course. Dan says, “Yeah, maybe we should save that for another lesson,” meaning that discussion for another lesson. That’s a whole ‘nother story, the tap dancing.

First of all, this is a very interesting phrase because it’s completely grammatically incorrect, yet people use this all the time in very colloquial English especially American Southern English. But you hear it all over. ‘Whole ‘nother’ meaning ‘whole another’ story or ‘whole other’ story, but it comes out as ‘whole ‘nother’. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it rolls off the tongue more easily that way.

The meaning is, the literal meaning is that is another story to talk about but the actual meaning that it has is a story that is interesting, that actually will grab your attention and there’s something there in that story that is worth spending time on. So if you’re talking about one topic and another topic comes up that is interesting but you don’t want to spend time talking about right now, you can say, “Oh, that’s a whole ‘nother story. That’s a whole ‘nother thing. That’s a whole ‘nother issue.

That’s completely different than what we’re talking about and it is interesting. There’s something valuable in that discussion but we’ll talk about that another time. That’s a whole ‘nother issue.

That’s a whole ‘nother story.” That’s when you use it. You’ll hear people say that, ‘whole ‘nother’. I just think that’s a really interesting phrase.

8. red shirting Okay, let’s see here. Let’s go to ‘red shirting’. Dan mentions this ‘red shirting’. Actually he tells us what it means but I’m interested in the phrase itself and where it comes from because first of all, ‘red shirting’ is when, in an academic sense, when you start a child a little bit later in their grade so that they are older than their peers. They are older than the other children slightly for the advantage of giving them a head start to build their confidence. Or there could be other reasons.

There could be emotional reasons or developmental reasons with children.

But actually, this term is fairly recent and it derives from sports because what happens especially in college sports in America, you’re only eligible to play for 4 years. But sometimes a kid, an 18- year-old kid might come along who is not quite ready yet or maybe has some academic issues and they red shirt that athlete in sports. The athlete practices with the team but sits out for a whole year, cannot play, is ineligible to play. And then for the next 4 years after that, they play the sport and they are eligible for competition. So actually they spend 5 years total with the team but they only play for 4 years which is the maximum that you can play, and they’re called ‘red shirts’. The reason they’re called ‘red shirts’ is because when they practice with the team traditionally, they wore red jerseys so that others could identify them not as real members of the team but only practicing members of the team. That’s actually where it comes from. This is an academic term…

It’s a term used in academia now but it comes from sports, ‘red shirting’.

Do you know anyone that has been red shirted? It can be used as a verb, ‘to red shirt’, and it can also be used as an adjective. He’s a red shirt freshman. He’s a red shirt athlete. He’s a red shirt student.

9. a no-brainer The next one is ‘no-brainer’. A ‘no-brainer’ is something very, very easy to understand. So in our conversation Dan says that the main point that Gladwell wants to communicate is really a no- brainer. The more hours you put in, the more likely it is that you’re going to achieve success. That’s a no-brainer. Anybody can understand that. You can use this term to basically describe anything that’s super easy to understand or a decision that’s easy to make. It’s a no-brainer.

For example, riding a motorcycle with no helmet is a bad thing to do. So you should wear a helmet, definitely. That’s a no-brainer. You should definitely wear a helmet. That’s a no-brainer. Same with driving a car. If you don’t wear a seatbelt, your chances of dying even in a very low speed accident or quite high, so you should your seatbelt. That’s a no-brainer. That’s very easy to understand.

If you have money you should keep it somewhere safe, like put it in a bank. Don’t carry it all around in cash because someone might take it or you might lose it. That’s a no-brainer. Anybody can understand that. That’s a no- brainer.

10. ain’t The very last one is ‘ain’t’. Dan and I are joking around at the very end of the conversation and I tell him I’m not going to mentor you, Dan, and he says, well then I ain’t mentoring you, either.

There’s a couple of things here. First of all, what does ‘ain’t’ mean, and why does Dan use it? First of all, it means ‘am not’. I am not, he is not, she is not, we are not, they are not. ‘Ain’t’. So Dan says, “I ain’t mentoring you.” Or she ain’t going to come with you or he ain’t going to be your friend or we ain’t going to listen to you. They ain’t from around here.

Who uses this and why? This is basically a way of speaking that comes from the American south, the Southern dialect. It’s used frequently. It’s very, very colloquial and I think that’s why Dan uses it.

At the very end of the conversation, we’re joking around as friends. Actually, both Dan and I come from the Southern part of the United States and sometimes when we’re being very casual, we might use this term amongst many other terms. It just means ‘am not’.

I would recommend not using this if I were you because it carries connotations of being uneducated. It also will sound a little odd, a little strange to other people if you speak this way. If you’re from the south, if you’re American, you can use this in certain context and there’s no problem with it, people would expect it. So Dan and I, we can use this, no problem, when we’re being casual. But for people who are not from the United States, it just sounds a little strange unless you have spent lots and lots of time there and you know how to very skillfully use this word in different situations. I would not recommend using it but you should understand the meaning of it and how it’s used. So that’s ‘ain’t’.

Okay, well that brings us to the end. I hope you enjoyed this vocab commentary. See you soon! The End.