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CONVERSATIONAL VOCABULARY

LAUGHTER AND TEARS

Hello, everyone. Aaron here. In this audio recording, I want to talk a little bit about some of the words and phrases that Dan and I used in our conversation about crying and laughing.

1. cry me a river

The first is cry me a river. This is what Dan says to me. He says, “Aaron, cry me a river.” What that means is he is commanding me or ordering me to cry heavily, profusely, right, with lots of tears, to cry very strongly, is to cry someone a river, but that is not the normal way that this idiom is used. Usually, we use this idiom in a sarcastic way to tell someone to stop complaining, so if someone is complaining too much, you can turn to them and say, “Cry me a river.” Which means, I’m tired of hearing you complain. Stop complaining. Imagine that you’re at work, and you have a project to do with another coworker, and the coworker shows up in the morning, and he says, “Oh, I’m really tired. I don’t want to work on the project today. I was up very late last night, and I had lots to do, and I didn’t get much sleep, and I just don’t feel like working today.”

You can say, “Oh, cry me a river, John,” right? We’ve got lots of work to do. Let’s get started, right? I don’t want to hear you complain. Cry me a river.

1. bawl your eyes out

There are numerous ways to refer to the act of crying, and one of them I mention a few lines later is bawl, B-A-W-L. Sounds like ball, like a soccer ball, but it’s spelled differently, so to bawl also means to cry heavily, strongly, loudly, right? If someone’s really upset, they may bawl, and in fact, they may bawl their eyes out.

There’s an idiom there. You cry so hard that your eyes come out of their sockets, to bawl your eyes out, right? The little girl was so upset that she lost her favorite toy she bawled her eyes out for the rest of the afternoon. She cried very, very loud, and she bawled her eyes out. Have you ever bawled your eyes out?

1. shed a tear

A less strong way to refer to crying is to shed a tear. In fact, sometimes this means to just cry very lightly, to shed a tear. To shed means to get rid of or let go of, and a tear, a tear. Not many tears, but a tear. Shed a tear. It just means cry, or cry very lightly, or maybe just get teary-eyed, and one or two tears drop out of your eyes, right, and shed a tear. Sometimes sentimental movies will make us shed a tear, or the thought of a loved one who passed away many years ago might make you shed a tear, okay, so that’s what that means. It just means cry, or cry lightly.

1. pull at one’s heart strings

A little bit later in the conversation, Dan mentions another idiom, which is to pull at people’s heartstrings. If something pulls at your heartstrings, what does that mean? If you imagine literally your heart being attached to some long string, and whenever someone pulls one of those strings, it elicits an emotional reaction in you, you feel moved when something pulls at your heartstrings, emotionally moved to cry, or to feel sadness, or maybe sympathy, or empathy. It pulls at your heartstrings. When you see a little, tiny, cute kitten abandoned on the side of the road, that’s the kind of thing that might pull at your heartstrings, and you feel a sense that you want to help that little kitten. It pulls at your heartstrings. Many situations, people, events, can pull at your heartstrings and cause you to cry. Has anything pulled at your heartstrings recently?

1. was vs. were

All right. Moving on a little bit. There’s a sentence that I say when we’re talking about crying, Dan’s talking about his daughter not crying outside the home, but crying often inside the home, and of course, as Dan and I often do, we joke around, and I said to Dan, “Well, she lives with you. Of course. I mean, I’d be crying all the time if I was living with you.” Obviously I’m being sarcastic. I’m just poking at Dan, and making fun of the situation, but I want you to pay attention to the sentence. I’d be crying all the time. I would be crying all the time if I was living with you. If I was living with you, I would be crying all the time. Contrast that with if I were living with you, I would be crying all the time, or I would be crying all the time if I were living with you. What’s the difference? I actually had this question recently in our forum.

What’s the difference between using was and were in this kind of unreal conditional sentence? The answer is there’s really no difference in meaning, but there is a small difference in the connotation and the feeling of using were versus using was. Really, when you use were in this kind of sentence, it has a very proper sounding connotation. It sounds very proper. It sounds very nice. It sounds very educated. Sounds more formal. I’d be crying all the time if I were living with you, right? That’s the kind of thing that a British method actor might say on the stage of a play, but I’m not that. I’m hanging out with my good friend Dan, and that, it reveals my mindset. I’m in a casual situation. I’m joking around, and I use was, which is a little bit more appropriate, because was has a very casual sounding meaning. Even in some cases, if I were using that in a context of, let’s say, an academic conference, or in a professional meeting, it might come across as being a little bit crude, or not so erudite-sounding, not so nice. You should be aware that both are okay, was or were, but were is more proper. Was is more casual, more colloquial.

1. mug

Okay, so moving on. Actually the very next thing Dan says is, “Yeah, she’s got to look at this mug,” so he’s responding to my little joke about her crying all the time because she’s living with him, and he says, “Yeah, she’s got to look at this mug.”

Mug commonly means drinking cup. We drink coffee out of a mug, but it’s also used to mean face, and not just any kind of face. It generally means a very plain looking or even somewhat ugly looking face. You talk about someone’s mug, you don’t have a picture in your mind of a beautiful face. It’s kind of a, either a plain, or homely, or kind of ugly looking face. My ugly mug, and in fact, we often put the adjective ugly in front of mug. Your ugly mug, my ugly mug, his ugly mug.

In fact, now I read this on the internet, so it’s not necessarily true, but what I read was that drinking cups back in the 17th and 18th centuries commonly had the images of human faces drawn on them, or even molded into them. The mugs, the drinking mugs, actually looked like human faces. I don’t know if that’s true, but it would explain why we refer to faces as mugs these days, and you’ll also hear the term mug shot, which is a photo of someone’s face.

And generally we use it when we’re talking about criminals who are arrested for a crime, and they are taken in, and their photo is taken from the front and from the side. Those are called mug shots, right? Mug shots. If you go to a nice studio, and have your picture taken by a professional photographer, you wouldn’t call that a mug shot. You would call that a portrait, so that’s a mug. That’s a mug.

1. cathartic

All right. Moving on, I want to just briefly mention the term cathartic. This is what Dan says. He says, “I totally buy that part of the research,” buy meaning not literally buy, but he believes. He believes that part of the research he buys it. He buys that part of the research saying that it’s cathartic for many people, so this term cathartic basically describes anything that provides some kind of psychological relief through the expression of emotion, strong emotion, openly, open expression of emotion.

In doing so, the idea is that you get out all those tensions, and all those feelings that are wrapped up in the issue at hand, and by expressing them, you come to terms with them. You get rid of them. It’s cathartic, and so the act itself is a catharsis, but the adjective is cathartic. Think, what are some cathartic activities?

There are many cathartic activities. For example, singing, or maybe dancing, certainly laughing, and crying, and moaning, and some people say exercises can be cathartic, or a good, long conversation with a close friend. That can be cathartic as well, so yeah, that’s what that term means. Cathartic.

1. hang

Okay, just a few more here. Towards the very end of the conversation, Dan’s talking about elephant, and when an elephant dies in the family, I guess you could say, the other elephants hang near the body, that little phrasal verb there, hang near. To hang is really short for hang around, or hang out, or hang about. It means just to stay in that area. You hang around there. You hang out there. Of course nearby, not far away. You hang out nearby. You hang near, so that’s maybe not such a common phrasal verb, but I wanted to point that out. The elephants hang around near the body.

1. on that note

A couple of lines later, Dan says, “Well, on that note, until next time.” I wanted to point your attention to the phrase, on that note. This is something that comes actually from music, a musical note, on that note, so a note has a certain tone to it. That tone can elicit certain feelings, so if we kind of think of our conversation as a musical performance, the very last thing that was said, that’s that note. If we move on to a different conversation topic, it will take on a new note, right, just like a musical performance, or a melody. We say this at the end of something.

The end of a conversation, or at the end of a performance, or at the end of an activity, we can say, “Okay, well, on that note, let’s end this meeting, or on that note, let’s get out of here, or well, on that note, let’s wrap this thing up. Let’s finish our conversation.” Or you could even say something like, “Wow, well that’s not such a nice note to end on. Let’s talk about something more positive before we say goodbye,” something like that. Yeah. You’ll often hear this at the very end of a conversation.

1. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch

All right, and speaking of ends of conversations, we are to our very last … This is actually an idiom that Dan mentions. At the very end of the conversation, he says, “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.” I wanted to point this out because it just doesn’t make any sense what he’s doing here. I wanted to make it clear that yes, there is no connection between that idiom and any of the other things we were talking about. He just sort of humorously spat it out, or threw that out there into the conversation because I guess we had earlier been talking about chickens, and he wanted to say something funny. Notice my response. I said, “Because if you do, you’ll be crying,” and that was my attempt to connect it back to the main topic of our conversation, which is crying and laughing.