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CONVERSATIONAL VOCABULARY

HUMAN CARGO AND EMOTIONAL BAGGAGE

All right, Aaron here. Hello, everyone. I’m now going to talk about some of the vocabulary and phrases that Dan and I talked about in our conversation on the stories related to cargo and baggage.

1. I’m hanging in there

The first is a greeting, and actually it’s a response to a greeting, ‘I’m hanging in there’. Dan says, “How are you doing, Aaron?” And I say, “I’m hanging in there.” It means I’m fine. “Hello, how are you?” “I’m fine, thanks.” But it also implies that things might not be so smooth or easy in my life right now, that I might be facing some challenges. So I’m fine but there are many other things going on, and I’m clinging to that situation. I’m not giving up. I’m trying my best. I’m fine but maybe I could be more relaxed, something like that.

We can also use ‘hang in there’ as a command to someone else. If your friend is running in a marathon race and you see him pass you and he looks like he’s in pain, maybe he has cramps, he looks very tired, you can say, “Hey, hang in there. You only have 30 minutes to go. Just hang in there. Don’t give up.”

If someone loses a loved one or they break up with a girlfriend or boyfriend or maybe they lost their job and they’re going through a difficult emotional time, you can tell them, “Hey, hang in there. Things will get better. Just hang in there. Don’t give up.”

1. apropos

The next one is ‘apropos’. Dan says, “So we’re talking about bags,” in response to what I said, “Hey Dan, you walked in with a bag today,” and he’s kind of joking with me. Basically, ‘apropos’ means appropriate, suitable, relevant. “How suitable, how appropriate for you to say that because we’re going to be talking about bags and baggage.”

Actually, this is a word that very few people say, and actually I was surprised to hear Dan say it. It’s not a word that you hear very often. It’s quite rare. You’ll usually hear very kind of erudite or educated people say this word. I’m not saying that Dan is not one of those people, but our relationship is a casual relationship. It’s not a formal relationship. And this is a kind of formal word that he used. So it’s good. It exposes us to this word. But many native speakers don’t even know what it means, so I wouldn’t recommend using it, but you should understand it if you hear it.

Let me give you some other examples. Let’s say that you are really sad. You’re feeling depressed, and guess what? It’s raining. It’s dark and gray outside. It’s cold and rainy. We would say that the weather is apropos to your emotions on that day. It’s fitting. It’s suitable. It’s appropriate for the situation.

Or maybe one of your co-workers, not a close friend, it’s a co-worker, is having a birthday party, and you need to get a gift for your co-worker. What you should do is get a gift that is apropos to the nature of your relationship. You should not show up with a bouquet or red roses, which is a romantic gift. Or you should not show up with some very expensive, thousand-dollar gold watch to give your co-worker. That’s just not appropriate. It’s not apropos to the nature of your relationship.

So it should be a small gift, something nice but not very expensive. That would be apropos to the nature of that relationship.

Just remember, a lot of people don’t know what that means, but it is useful. You will eventually, occasionally hear it.

1. a big fan of

The next one is an easy one, ‘a big fan of’. Dan says, “I’m a big fan of backpacks,” and that just means he likes backpacks very much. He loves backpacks. He’s really interested in backpacks. He’s a big fan of backpacks.

You use this phrase when you want to talk about something that you really, really like. So instead of saying, “Oh, I love travelling,” or, “I like travelling very much,” you could say, “I’m a big fan of travelling.” My wife is a big fan of chocolate. My friend, Andy, is a big fan of cycling. My dad is a big fan of golf.

Also, we can take the object of this, the noun, and we can put it between ‘big’ and ‘fan’. So if I am a big fan of travelling, I can say, “I’m a big travelling fan. I’m a big travelling fan.” “My wife is a big chocolate fan.” What are you a big fan of? Are you a big fan of anything?

1. goony

The next one is ‘goony’. This is kind of an interesting word. We’re still talking about backpacks and I say, “Hey look, Dan, I see all kinds of people wearing suits with backpacks on,” and Dan says, “Yeah, probably some of your goony friends.” Dan is just joking with me.

This word ‘goon’, well, ‘goony’ as he says ‘goony friends’, he’s using an adjective, but the actual noun is ‘goon’. The adjective ‘goony’ comes from the noun ‘goon’ which is kind of a slang-sounding term.

It basically has a number of different meanings. Generally, a goon is kind of a foolish or big, kind of dumb, rough-looking person.

Sometimes you’ll hear this word used to talk about a hired person, someone who is paid for let’s say security or to help an unsavory character, like a mob boss or a criminal, to do their jobs or duty. But in this case, Dan doesn’t mean that about my friends. What he’s saying in a joking way is that some of my friends are kind of silly, kind of goofy, a little bit foolish. So it doesn’t have a really negative meaning because Dan and I are friends, and I know that he’s just saying that my friends are just kind of silly. But you have to be careful using this word because it could have a very negative meaning, someone who’s dumb or stupid or rough or kind of just complete foolish behavior, that kind of thing. So be careful using ‘goony’ or ‘goon’.

1. mind-boggling

The next one is ‘mind-boggling’. We’re talking about technology and how some of it is just mindboggling. I talked specifically about the iPhone the very first time I saw it about 10 years ago. I couldn’t believe it, that you could touch it and it would do all those things without pressing any keys or keyboards. So I said it was mind-boggling that that technology existed.

‘Mind-boggling’ comes from the verb ‘to boggle’. It basically has two different meanings. One meaning is to just confuse and overwhelm and bewilder. It’s another way of saying ‘to confuse’ a person, ‘to boggle’. But it can also mean ‘to make a mistake’. ‘To boggle’ something means to botch it, or to make a mistake about it. When I say it’s mind boggling, I’m not talking about making a mistake, I’m talking about the overwhelming nature of new technology. It boggles the mind. It is mind-boggling. It is so bewildering, overwhelming, amazing, we just can’t understand how it could possibly exist. It’s mind-boggling.

When we think about the size of the universe, oh, it’s mind-boggling. You just can’t even conceptualize it. It’s so large, it’s so spacious. It’s mind-boggling.

1. lo and behold

Next one is ‘lo and behold’. This is a useful one and it’s also very common to hear. What I like about it is that it comes from very, very old, old English from the Middle Ages. It has a very old feeling to it. Dan’s talking about this shaman that went into the forest and he had a vision of this guy named John Frum. And he came back and told everybody about it. Then they started to reject Christianity and from their own religion. And Dan says, “Lo and behold, the Europeans did leave not long after that, and then these new visitors came that John Frum had told people about from his visions.” Basically, and this is kind of hard to explain actually. ‘Lo and behold’, first of all it literally means ‘look and see’. ‘Lo’ means ‘look’ and actually I think it’s short for the old English word ‘loke’ which kind of means ‘to look’ or ‘to see’. And ‘behold’, of course, means ‘to look at this’, ‘see this’, ‘behold’.

When you say ‘lo and behold’, you’re basically telling people literally, look and see. But the actual way we use this is to introduce a turn of events in a conversation. Sometimes, I would say more often than not, it’s something surprising, something amazing, something wow, amazing, maybe even unexpected.

For example, let’s say you’re standing in line at the supermarket and suddenly you’re thinking about your best friend from high school who you haven’t seen in 20 years. And you’re just daydreaming while you’re waiting to check out. And lo and behold, the person standing in front of you is your high school friend who you haven’t seen in 20 years. Wow! Amazing. Unbelievable.

That’s when you would introduce that situation using ‘lo and behold’.

Now, the way Dan uses it is a little bit different, and this is also the way some people use it. It means ‘as expected’ or ‘not surprisingly’. It could have been predicted even though it has a surprising nature. In this case, Dan’s setting up a story and he’s saying that this cult… He’s talking about the origins of the cult. Of course, these new people are going to come, otherwise, the religion never would have formed. So we can kind of predict that this surprising event is going to happen even though it’s not so surprising because we can predict it.

What is surprising in the story is that these new Europeans came that had all these technology and they were friendly and they were generous. That is surprising in that context. But we know it’s actually predictable because we’re listening to a story. So Dan sort of uses it in this way, meaning, as you might expect, these new Europeans came.

Let me go back to the example I gave you about standing in line in the supermarket. Let’s say the same high school friend, he and I did keep in touch for many years. And just recently, like a week ago, we got into a big argument, a big fight, and I said to him, “I never want to see you again.” And he says, “Oh yeah? Well, I vow, I make a vow, I will never talk to you again the rest of my life.” So we’ve totally cut each other out of our lives. Then, just a week later, I’m standing in line in the supermarket, and lo and behold, guess who is standing in front of me? My high school friend. It means that as you might predict, he’s standing there and we had to talk to each other. We we’re forced to talk to each other. So that might be a way that the second meaning of ‘lo and behold’. It could have been predicted based on the context of the story.

1. abolitionist

Moving on. We’re moving to ‘abolitionist’. This is kind of a historical word referring to the struggles that many societies have had with slavery. Specifically, Dan and I are referring to the United States history of slavery. An ‘abolitionist’ is a person and it’s a person who supports the abolition of slavery.

‘Abolition’ comes from the verb ‘to abolish’. ‘To abolish’ means to formally put an end to a law or some kind of practice in society. ‘To abolish’ it means to make it banned. You cannot do this anymore. It is formally done away with. No longer does it exist.

When it comes to slavery, ‘abolition’ is the act of ending slavery, formally through law. ‘Abolitionism’ is the movement to end slavery. An ‘abolitionist’ of course is a person supporting the abolition of slavery. They’re kind of like freedom fighters. They’re activists. It took a long time to actually abolish slavery in the United States. It started just after the birth of the United States in the late 1700s.

Many of the northern states abolished slavery, but it took 100 years and then a war, a civil war to end it in the south. Of course, the south needed slaves economically, so they thought. So there are big, big differences between the north and the south. Many people died over this and of course, many slaves suffered for so many years.

Anyway, that is ‘abolitionism’ and an ‘abolitionist’ is a person supporting the ending of slavery.

1. to milk something

There’s a couple more here, three more to be exact. One is ‘to milk (something)’. We’re talking about this Henry “Box” Brown and how after he mailed himself to freedom, he then went around giving talks and speeches, and went to Europe and went on tour. And I said, “Yeah, he really milked that incident,” and I never got to finish my sentence because Dan interrupted me and says that he got criticism for that.

‘To milk’ actually comes the verb ‘to milk a cow’, to extract milk from a cow. The old-fashioned way of doing it of course is to grab the cow’s udder and squeeze it, squeeze the milk out of the udder into a bucket. So that action of squeezing milk out of a big milk sac below the cow, you can transfer that sort of conception to a situation where you draw out personal gain or some kind of profit, ‘milk’ from a situation. So you ‘milk’ that situation for personal gain. This is what we’re talking about, what I referred to that this man, Henry “Box” Brown, yes, he did a very risky thing, but then he milked it for personal gain and personal profit, which some people think is an okay thing to do, some people think it’s not okay to do that. That’s why he got criticism for it.

Some people milk the government. Especially, we often hear this used with people who are on welfare. Let’s say they’ve lost their jobs, they’re collecting money from the government, but they don’t try to find another job and they find ways to just keep that welfare money coming in year after year after year, when really that’s not the purpose of the money. The purpose of the money is to help you out, not to keep you surviving without working forever, especially if you’re able to work.

So those people, we might say they’re milking the system.

Sometimes, greedy lawyers or greedy financial advisors might milk their clients for more money by telling them things that are not true and trying to get them to pay extra fees, things like this. That’s to milk a client.

Sometimes, we milk situations for our own personal gain. That’s what it means to milk something or to milk a situation. Have you ever milked a situation? I think we all have in some way or another.

1. brooding over

The next one is ‘brooding over’. Dan’s talking about, we spend a lot of time thinking about our ego being attacked or people who have insulted us or things that bother us instead of just letting it go, and I say, “Yeah, brooding over.” And we talk about the story of the monk where one guy physically carried the woman over the puddle, but the other guy just kept brooding about it, about how upset he was that she was not thankful, that she was rude, and we helped her and she just didn’t care. He was brooding over it.

‘To brood over’ basically means to worry about or to think deeply about something in an unhappy, upset, angry kind of way. I always imagine a brooding person with a frown on their face and their eyebrows are furrowed. That’s not healthy. You shouldn’t brood over things. Some people brood over the loss of money or the loss of fortune. They just spend all their time brooding over their problems, and that makes the situation worse. Of course, we all have problems, but if we brood over them constantly, we’re just feeding those negative thoughts and they get worse and worse.

Stop feeding negative thoughts. Don’t brood over your problems. Work to solve them and let the rest take care of itself.

1. catch you next time

Last one is ‘catch you next time’. This is a way of saying goodbye. It literally means… I’m sorry, it doesn’t literally mean; it figuratively means ‘goodbye’. The literal meaning, of course, is ‘catch’ meaning ‘to grab’. “I’ll grab you. I’ll catch you next time we meet.” But it just means ‘goodbye’.

“Goodbye. Catch you next time. See you later. See you around. Talk to you later.” You might also hear people say things like ‘catch you on the rebound’ or ‘catch you on the flip side’, and those are just alternative ways of saying ‘catch you next time’ or ‘goodbye’.

So with that, I’ll catch you next time. I hope these were useful. I hope you put them into practice in your conversations.