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Conversational Vocabulary

Hi there. Aaron here of Deep English. I’m now going to talk about the conversation Dan and I had about the power of expectancy.

1. take you under my wing

The very first phrase I want to draw your attention to is ‘take you under my wing’. Dan is, at the very beginning of the conversation, Dan is talking about how relaxed he feels, and then I say, “Wow, I wish I were relaxed. I’m feeling very stressed out.” And then Dan says, “Well, I’m going to take you under my wing and I’m going to teach you everything I know.” Okay, Dan’s just joking around, of course. But to ‘take someone under your wing means to help them learn something, to help them develop and grow. Very often, a mentor will do this to an apprentice. To ‘take someone under your wing’ means to help them learn, develop and grow, and protect them at the same time. Imagine a mother bird opening her wings and the little chicks get underneath and she protects them from physical things. We use this in a non-physical way, generally.

Let me give you a real example. About 10 years ago, I started a new job. No one was there to help me on my first day. I felt really lost and confused. But luckily, one of my co-workers realized the situation and even though he was not supposed to do it, he took me under his wing and he showed me everything I needed to know: where the copy room was and where to get the best lunch. He showed me around and really helped me get up to speed quickly and learn what I needed to know. So I was very grateful for this co-worker. I was very grateful that he took me under his wing. That’s an example. And if you ever see an opportunity to take someone under your wing and help them learn something, please do it. It’s a good thing to do for other people. Take them under your wing.

1. let’s get to it

All right. I’m going to move to the next one which happens just a little bit later. Dan says, “Okay, we’re done goofing around. This is nonsense. Let’s get to the topic,” and I say, “All right. Let’s get to it.” So ‘let’s get to it’. Let’s get to the topic. This is a phrase that basically means ‘let’s focus now’, ‘let’s work now’, ‘let’s get something done now’, ‘let’s get to it’.

One example might be, it’s going to rain this afternoon and the car is really dirty. You need to wash it because tomorrow is a big day. You’re going to use the car. Let’s wash that car right now. Let’s get to it before it rains.

Another example might be we’re having some guests come to our house in the late afternoon, and already it’s lunchtime and we still haven’t cleaned the house. We need to get to it now. Let’s get to it now because otherwise, the guests are going to show up and the house is going to be a mess.

So let’s get to it.

So it just means ‘let’s do it’, ‘let’s work’, ‘let’s focus now’, ‘let’s get it done’. Get to it.

1. blown away

All right. Next phrase is ‘blown away’. Dan says, “We’re talking about expectations and I was pretty blown away when I first heard about this character, Daniel Kish.” That’s the blind man. To be ‘blown away’ basically means to be amazed. It means to be astonished. “I was amazed when I heard about this character, Daniel Kish. I was astonished. I was astounded. I was dumbfounded. I was stunned.

I couldn’t believe it. It was unbelievable. I was blown away.”

We imagine this verb ‘blow away’, it’s a phrasal verb, imagine like a bomb blowing up. It sends shrapnel flying and if there are any bodies nearby, they get blown into the air and off their feet and away several yards. That’s to be ‘blown away’. Or imagine a big typhoon or hurricane comes through with really super strong winds and it just blows trees away and blows cars away, and blows animals and people away. It’s just to lift you off your feet and to move you away.

So anything that astounds you or amazes you, or something you can’t believe, you can say, “I was blown away. It blew me away.” Like this. So that’s blown away. What blows you away? Have you ever been blown away? Talk about it.

1. babied

We’re going to move to the next one and that is ‘babied’. Dan says that this guy Daniel Kish believes that echolocation is an ability we can all develop. But that he was in a very unique situation, he was blind and the environment just did not allow him to see like a normal person. And he didn’t have help. He wasn’t ‘babied’ by the people around him. And that’s the word I want to draw your attention to, is ‘babied’.

This is quite common in English to take a common noun or a noun that most people use as a noun, and turn it into a verb. So the noun of course is ‘baby’ which is a very, very young human being. ‘To baby’, we can say, ‘to baby someone’, and that means to take care of them as you would a baby, to treat them kind of like a baby by doing everything for them, by doing everything, like not allowing that person to do anything for themselves. The interesting thing about human beings is we’re often creatures of comfort and creatures of habit. So if you are a child and you’re parents ‘baby’ you or your teachers ‘baby’ you, you will not grow and develop into an autonomous individual, which I think is a very important thing to be as an adult. So you don’t learn what you need to know. This is ‘to baby’ someone.

You shouldn’t baby anybody. Of course it’s important to help people, but by babying them, you’re not actually helping them. You’re hurting them. So we should not ‘baby’ other people, ever. Even babies we shouldn’t baby. I mean, of course they need all of their needs met. They need to be held and they need food and they need to be bathed and they need lots of affection and love, but they also need to develop independence. So to ‘baby’ someone is kind of a negative thing. Don’t baby other people.

1. go off

All right. Let’s move on to the next one which is ‘go off’. Dan is talking about the fact that Daniel Kish would go off alone and ride a bicycle as a blind boy, and his mother totally let him do it even though the police, her family, her friends, the teachers were saying, “This is dangerous. You can’t let a blind kid go off alone and ride a bicycle. He’s going to hurt himself.” And sure enough, Daniel did hurt himself. He knocked his teeth out.

But ‘go off’, this phrasal verb ‘to go off’, this basically means to kind of change direction toward a place you’re not actually supposed to be or expected to be. This could have a positive meaning; it could have a negative meaning. It depends on the situation.

We imagine a train, this is probably the easiest way to understand this phrasal verb, imagine a train going down the tracks and it goes off the track. Now that’s a very negative thing. It will cause the train to crash. So that’s one negative meaning. You certainly don’t want the train to derail and go off the tracks.

A traveller goes off the beaten path. The difference between a tourist and a traveller is a tourist will stay on the beaten path. A tourist will go to all of the main tourist attractions and go to the main shopping areas and stay on a very well beaten path. But a traveller makes a point to go off the beaten path, to explore areas that most tourists never go. And in doing so, learns and grows, and has interesting experiences, unique experiences. So if you travel to a foreign country, you should go off the beaten path, unless it happens to be a location or an area where there could be some danger, then it’s probably best not to go off alone into unknown areas. You could get in trouble.

Same as if you are in a deep, dark forest. You want to stay on the path. Don’t go off alone. You might get lost. We might never see you again.

You might tell someone, “Hey don’t go off and do something else. Stay with me. Are you listening to this lesson right now? Well, don’t go off and do something else. Stay with me. Finish this lesson.” So ‘to go off’ means to move to a different place.

That’s one meaning of this phrasal verb. There are actually several other meanings that we’re not going to talk about, but look it up. Look it up on the internet. You can see many different examples.

This is only one of them.

1. stands in the way of

All right. A little bit later, Dan is talking about Daniel’s mother, and he’s saying that his mother had real courage. She was brave. All parents kind of have to do this in some way. Their children need to become independent and they need to learn from their mistakes. So it’s very hard for Daniel when everyone was telling the mother to not do that, to protect Daniel, to take better care of him.

And Dan is saying that very often, their desire to protect their child, and we’re talking about parents, the parents’ desire to protect the child is sometimes what really ‘stands in the way’ of those children becoming independent. The desire to protect the attachment to a child sometimes ‘stands in the way of those children becoming independent beings. That’s what Dan is saying here.

So ‘stand in the way of’ is what the phrase is, and it means ‘to prevent’ or ‘to retard’, ‘to prevent something from happening’. It could have an actual physical meaning. If you imagine someone standing in your way, you can’t get by them if they’re standing in your way. For example, maybe I’m late to catch a train. It’s leaving in 10 seconds and I’m running to the train tracks but I couldn’t reach the train on time because there were too many people standing in my way. That’s of course the physical meaning but this phase often has a metaphorical meaning.

Many things can stand in the way of other things. For example, we might say, “Laziness stands in the way of success.” Meaning that if you’re lazy, how are you going to succeed? Because hard work is important, it’s an important part of being successful at anything you do in life.

Too much focus on accuracy, if we’re talking about language learning, too much focus on accuracy can stand in the way of developing greater fluency. We talk about this a lot here at Deep English, to let go of the focus on accuracy and allow yourself, give yourself the freedom to make all kinds of mistakes for the benefit of your fluency. So don’t focus too much on accuracy because it will stand in the way of you developing fluency.

Actually, if you want to succeed, don’t let anything stand in your way. Keep your eyes on the goal and focus hard on the moment and word hard and efficiently, and you’ll get there. Don’t let anything stand in your way. What’s standing in your way of becoming a better English speaker.

Okay, so I won’t stand in your way of completing this lesson any longer.

1. conflate

I’ll move on to the next one and that is a really useful verb ‘conflate’. ‘To conflate’ something. I really like this word. You don’t hear it very often in normal conversation, but I think we should hear it more often because it’s a really useful verb. It basically means ‘to fuse’, ‘to meld’, to take two things and make them one. But the way this word is to describe a practice of treating two completely separate things, two completely different concepts and treating them as if they were just one. This produces errors in understanding. Actually,

I guess a real basic way to understand this is if we’re talking about apples and oranges, don’t confuse them, they’re not the same. So if you say that, “Oh yes, apples are very juicy and they’ve got lots of Vitamin C and they’re very soft inside.” Well actually, no. You’re talking about oranges.

You’re not talking about apples. Don’t conflate them. Don’t confuse those two things, they’re different.

This word often has a negative meaning when we use it. We often hear this word most often in politics, or on the news, or in the newspaper when we’re talking about trying to deceive people by purposely confusing two topics, conflating those topics, making them seem as if they are one.

One of the biggest examples of this, this is like a classic example of modern times, in 2001, the administration of George Bush conflated the 9/11 attack in New York with the invasion of Iraq, with Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. As time went on, journalists uncovered the fact that those two situations had absolutely nothing to do with each other. There was no direct connection. But that administration used this conflation, they conflated those two to win the support of the American public to invade Iraq. And the Americans supported it because they were led to believe that this was Iraq having all these weapons of mass destruction and they were the ones behind these terrorist attacks in 9/11. Normally I don’t talk about politics because I don’t find it very interesting, but I’m using this to illustrate a point that this is a conflation and it’s done with the purpose of deceiving another person or a group of people, in this case the American public.

So be careful not to conflate two different concepts. In this case, we’re talking about mother’s love or a parent’s love, and we’re conflating it, we have to be careful not to conflate it, that is, with attachment. Love is not the same with attachment. So don’t conflate love with attachment.

Another example might be, don’t conflate politeness with being a good person. Just because someone is very polite, they smile, they look like nice people, they say nice things, that’s not the same as being a good person. Being a good person, you have to look at someone’s actions over time. So don’t conflate the two. That’s a dangerous thing to do because sometimes people who are not very polite or they don’t look like very happy people can actually be really great people by the actions they take.

1. hang on a second

All right. I’m talking too long. Let’s move on. I want to draw your attention to a little bit later in the conversation when Dan is talking and I suddenly interrupt him, and I say, “Hang on a second. Hang on a second. I’m confused, Dan. Did you say that this man was blind?” And we’re talking about the French revolutionary figure that he introduced. I want to draw your attention to this because it’s an example of Learning Strategy #16, that video series on interrupting someone and asking for clarification.

Actually, I did not plan this. This was a very authentic instance of me needing to stop Dan right in the middle of what he was saying because I did not understand a key point, and that was whether or not this man was blind. Because it would make a big difference to hearing the rest of the story, so I needed that piece of information. I interrupted Dan. Notice how he responded. He allowed me to ask a question. He answered that question, and then he went back to saying what he was going to say.

So use this technique. “Hang on second.” “Wait a minute.” “Hold on a minute.” “Excuse me, but…” And then ask your questions, and that’s a great way to improve your communication ability. Of course, you don’t want to do it all the time. You’ll be annoying to speak with. But if you do it occasionally, it’s a really good thing to practice.

Actually, interrupting goes hand in hand with clarifying the meaning of something.

1. goes hand in hand with

So ‘to go hand in hand with’ is the next phrase. This is something that I say when Dan and I are talking about the power of expectation. I brought up the idea that actually maybe it’s not the expectation that is causing people to perform better or to grow and develop better; maybe it’s the actions that expectation leads to, like greater attention or greater focus or more eye contact or favorability, that kind of thing. And maybe if we just practice those things, we don’t need the expectation there. And Dan is arguing that, “No, no, it actually goes hand in hand with believing,” and that’s what I say. I say, “Yeah, you’re right, Dan. It does goes hand in hand with believing. You have to believe in someone in order to do those things. You have to expect them to be successful in order to do those things on a subconscious level or maybe an unconscious level. So ‘hand in hand with’, and it just means ‘to go together with’.

You imagine two people holding hands with one another. Smoke goes hand in hand with fire, that’s an example. Another example might be, hard work goes hand in hand with success. Crime often goes hand in hand with poor economic conditions, that’s a common thing.

Or if we’re talking about improving our English, we might say fluency, speaking fluency, goes hand in hand with confidence. It’s really hard to be fluent if you’re not feeling confident. One of the big steps to fluency is increasing your confidence by practicing a lot on your own. Then you start feeling more confident. And then it’s easier to be fluent when you speak because you’re not so worried about making mistakes or what other people are going to think of you. So don’t conflate those two, though. Fluency is not the same as confidence. Don’t conflate them. They’re separate things, but they go hand in hand with one another. That’s what they do.

1. backfire

All right. Very last one is ‘backfire’. This is what I say towards the end of the conversation. We’re talking again about the power of expectancy, and I talk about my own experience when I was in high school, in junior high school playing tennis competitively, I had very high expectations myself.

It backfired. It actually made me perform worse because I put a lot of pressure and stress on myself. We all know that a lot of pressure and stress, I guess I should say too much pressure and stress, can lead to poor performance. A little bit of stress is a good thing. So it could backfire.

Basically, ‘to backfire’ means to have the opposite effect as the desired effect, as the intended effect. It’s another way of saying you’re making a situation worse. It’s usually a negative meaning.

This comes actually from car engines. Car engines can backfire. If there’s some kind of mistimed explosion in the engine, like in one of the cylinders or in the exhaust. And you can hear a backfire.

It sounds like gunfire. It’s a big explosion that comes out the back of the car. So that’s a backfire.

When a car backfires, it can scare people. It can scare you because it’s a sudden, loud noise.

But expectations can backfire. So don’t become too attached to your expectations. You should be flexible with your expectations because if you are too attached to your expectations, they can backfire.

Backfiring can often happen when people try to do good things, when people are trying to do good, a bad result can happen. One example might be someone who’s trying to get in shape and lose weight. So they watch their diet and then they go out and they do lots of exercise. But maybe they’re trying too hard and they injure themselves, they injure a muscle, for example, in their back or in one of their joints, and they become in a lot of pain. So because of the pain, they have to sit down and take medicine. And they end up being really inactive for a week or two, and they actually gain more weight. So in their attempt to lose weight, it backfires and they end up gaining weight.

That happens in life a lot. So if things backfire, you have to be cautious of that and plan for that.

Some famous examples of things backfiring, sometimes companies will have marketing campaigns. They’ll introduce a new product or a new service with the intent of it increasing their sales and doing very well, but sometimes it can backfire. One of the famous examples of this was in the mid-1980s, like around 1985 or 1986, when the Coca-Cola Company introduced new Coke.

And they introduced Coke with a new formula hoping that people would buy that and it would increase their sales. It actually had the opposite effect. People didn’t like it and their sales went down and people were very upset about it. And that was a mistake by Coke. It backfired on them.

In my opinion, the American war on drugs has backfired. Of course, the intent is to protect people from themselves. If you make drugs legal, then people will get addicted to them and harm themselves. But in fact what has happened is it just encouraged this underground market of drugs, which led to lots and lots of crime, and it made criminals out of people. And now the jails are overcrowded and we have a bigger drug problem than ever before. So that’s an example of a government trying to institute a policy that backfires. So that’s another example of ‘backfired’, a very popular example.

Okay, that brings us to the end of this vocabulary commentary. I hope you benefitted from these.

Again, you got to put these to use. Think about them. Keep them in your consciousness. And if you have an opportunity, use them. A great way to do this is in our forums or on our blog. You can integrate these into some of your comments. Eventually, when it sinks deep enough, you can use it in conversation at any time. So, get to it. Get to it. Start using these. Okay, I’ll see you guys next month. Bye-bye.