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CONVERSATIONAL VOCABULARY

PATTERNS CAN BE BROKEN

Hi there, everyone, Aaron here. In this lesson, I’m going to talk about some of the words and phrases that Dan and I used in our conversation about change.

1. turning over a new leaf

The first is ‘turning over a new leaf.’ I asked Dan, “Have you been turning over any new leaves in your life recently?” Where does this come from? Well, imagine the image of seeing a fallen leaf on the ground, and when you turn it over there’s a potential for something new and interesting to be underneath. Maybe it’s a pebble, maybe it’s an acorn, maybe it’s an insect, but there’s that chance that you’re going to discover something new. But actually, this idiom comes from not leaves on the ground, but actually leaves of a book.

Long ago pages were called leaves, probably because of some of the materials they were made from, but if you were to turn over a page in a book that you’re reading, guess what? There’s going to be something new and interesting on the next page in the story. So this is where it really comes from. So to turn over a new leaf, figuratively, means to start something new, to move in a new direction in life.

Often it’s moving from negative to positive, but it doesn’t always have to be used that way. It can be used in a very neutral way, just meaning a big change in your life, turning over a new leaf.

So in the case of Shon Hopwood, he found himself in prison after bank robberies, and he decided to turn over a new leaf by becoming an expert in law, and then help himself and help other prisoners along the way. And so he turned over a new leaf. He moved from negative to positive in a very big way.

Let me give you another example. I used to live in San Francisco, in California, as a young man. And life was okay there, I was enjoying it, but I wanted something new. I wanted a new challenge. And so I moved to Asia. I made the decision to move to Asia, and that’s what I did, and it changed my life completely, right? I turned over a new leaf by moving from one country to a completely different part of the world.

That’s not moving from negative to positive. It’s a neutral change, but it’s a big change. It changed my life completely. So that’s how we use this idiom, turning over a new leaf. Have you turned over any new leaves in your life?

1. set in stone

All right, let’s move on. The next is ‘set in stone.’ What does that mean? Set in stone. We’re talking about changes, and Dan says, “Physical changes are easy, but things like personal growth, inner growth, your personality, those are kind of set in stone.

When something is set in stone it simply means it’s difficult or impossible to change. Imagine writing a sentence on a chalkboard. If you want to make changes in that sentence, it’s really easy to do. All you need to do is erase part of the sentence, and write that sentence again, or change aspects of the sentence. It’s easy. That’s why teachers use chalkboards.

Now if you carved the sentence into stone, like a gravestone for instance. That is very difficult to change, if not impossible. That’s where this comes from. When you carve something in stone, you can’t change it, it’s done.

So, how would we use this? Well, we often use it when we’re talking about plans, setting dates, setting times for meetings or events. When a date is not fixed yet, it’s not set in stone. You can change it easily. But when you set the date, and you announce the date for a meeting or an event, it becomes more difficult to change.

It still might not be set in stone, but it’s more difficult to change.

Now if you’re planning a wedding, something very important and expensive, when you set that wedding date and you announce that date, it becomes set in stone.

You just cannot change it. People are making hotel reservations. They may have purchased plane tickets. You can’t so easily change a wedding date. That becomes set in stone. If someone asks you to change it, you can say, “Sorry, it’s set in stone.”

1. you can’t teach an old dog new tricks

All right, right after Dan says ‘set in stone,’ he says, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” That’s a very, very common, very famous idiom in English that essentially means the older you get as a person, the more difficult it is to change things in your life, like habits or beliefs, or ways of doing things. I like the analogy of a young tree. When the tree is a sapling, when it’s just starting to grow, it’s very flexible. You can bend it almost all the way to the ground, and it won’t break. It’s easy to change. You can change as a young person quite easily because you’re growing, and you’re young, and you’re open to many things.

But when that tree grows old, it becomes stiff and brittle, and if you try to bend it, it may break. It may very well break. Yeah, that’s kind of what this idiom refers to.

The older we get, that we get set in our ways. Our habits become set in stone, and so it becomes hard to learn new things or to change your thinking, or to turn over a new leaf and start something new. It’s difficult, right? So, Dan says, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” I don’t believe it. I think you can.

1. down and out

The next is ‘down and out.’ What does that mean? Well, we’re talking about change, and I mentioned that there are some really good examples of people in down and out places that end up making the best of it, like Professor Hopwood.

So down and out, generally, refers to a person with no place to live, no job, no money, and they’re not feeling good about it. They’re not in a good space in their life. Life has its ups and downs, but some of the downs that people experience are very, very low, and when you’re in that space you are down and out. So, yeah, that’s what down and out means.

Do you know anyone who’s ever been down and out? Were you able to help them? Have you ever been down and out? I have been fortunate enough in my life never to have been down and out, but it could happen. It could happen. It could happen to anyone.

1. hardcore

All right, moving on. The next is ‘hardcore.’ Hardcore. Dan says, “If you do something violent in society, you can get sent to a hardcore prison, a more hardcore prison.” What does that mean exactly?

Well, this adjective generally means extreme, intense, and in addition to extreme and intense it has like sort of aggressive, violent connotations. For example, we would say hardcore violence, right? That’s really intense violence with lots of blood and guts. Hardcore pornography, which would be very explicit, and also aggressive. Hardcore music is very aggressive music that you might see people smashing into each other, and thrashing around when they’re dancing to it. That’s how we would use hardcore as an adjective.

You wouldn’t say, “Oh, he is such a kind and compassionate man. He is extremely kind, he’s hardcore kind.” No. You don’t have hardcore kindness. We don’t say hardcore kindness, or hardcore love, or hardcore compassion. We don’t use this adjective that way. We only use it with aggressive connotations. But, having said that, hardcore also can mean … it has a different meaning. It can also mean very committed to something, very dedicated to something.

For example, let’s imagine that you’re a member of a hiking group, and it’s a fairly big hiking group. There are 20, 30 people in it, and on the weekends once a month you choose a location in the mountains, and you go hiking all day together. And it’s fun, you meet people, you get to talk with them, but when the weather’s bad fewer people go on these trips. Maybe you only get 10 people going when the weather’s not so good instead of 20 or 30. But there in your hiking group, there are three hardcore members. What that means is, they will go hiking no matter what, even if it’s a hurricane or some kind of downpour with freezing cold weather. Nothing fazes them. They are so dedicated to going hiking.

They are hardcore members.

Music groups have many, many fans, especially if they’re successful, but some of those fans are hardcore fans. They buy every album, and they buy all the clothes of the band. And they don’t wait for the band to come to their city. They will travel with the band, and they will attend to all of the concerts. They’re hardcore fans.

Okay? That’s how we use it, hardcore.

1. in cold blood

All right, moving on. ‘In cold blood,’ we’re talking about this crazy person from I think it was Norway or some Scandinavian country who murdered dozens of people in cold blood. What does that mean? In cold blood. Well, in cold blood simply means without any emotion or feeling, and also it means in a cruel and calculated, very deliberate way, not in a passionate way. It’s usually almost always, actually, it’s almost always used to speak about violent actions with cruel intent in a very deliberate way.

For example, let’s imagine that there’s these two guys, and they get drunk and they start an argument with each other. And the argument escalates, and one guy picks up a stick and he hits the other guy over the head, and he hits him so hard that the guy ends up dying 24 hours later. He murdered the other guy, but he didn’t do it in cold blood, okay? He was very passionate. He was in the heat of passion because of this argument and this fight, and he didn’t calculate killing the guy. He didn’t mean to kill the guy. He just hit him with a stick. Of course, what he did was terrible, but it wasn’t in cold blood.

Now, if he had planned to kill the guy, and he set it up in a way that he had thought about it. He knew exactly what he was going to do, and he calmly walked up and smashed the guy over the head with a stick. Then, yes, he killed him in cold blood. That’s the difference, okay? So it just means without any emotion, with a cruel and calculated intent. You can attack someone in cold blood. You can kill someone in cold blood. You can hurt someone or maim them, or cause great injury to them in cold blood, but you can’t like hug someone in cold blood. No, you would just say, “She hugged him without any emotion or feeling, in a robotic way.” That’s not in cold blood because there’s no cruel intent there. And there’s no cause of violence.

1. over the top

All right, the next one is ‘over the top.’ That’s a little over the top. We’re talking about the same man that killed all these people in cold blood, and in the prison because the system there, in whatever country it was, is very lenient. They have a very … I guess you’d call it a very compassionate prison system, but Dan was saying that the man was complaining about not having the latest video game version of PlayStation.

I respond by saying, “Wow, that’s a little over the top. I don’t know how I would feel about that if one of my loved ones was murdered by him, and this guy is complaining about not having a PlayStation.” Shouldn’t he be reforming himself?

Shouldn’t he be doing meditation, meeting with counselors? Shouldn’t he be doing some kind of work that helps to contribute to society, or building value to give to society? That would be a good use of his time, not playing PlayStation. I’m saying that maybe that prison system is a good one, but things like that are over the top. What that means is just it’s beyond what is normally expected. It’s extreme, and sometimes to the point of no longer being acceptable.

Let me give you another example. Let’s imagine that you’re at work, and one of your coworkers who you don’t know very well, you know him a little bit, he says to you, “Hey listen, I forgot my lunch money. I mean I forgot my wallet at home, and I don’t have money for lunch. Can you lend me some money?” You say, “Sure,” and you give him $20. And you run into him a couple of days later, and he returns the money to you, and he says, “Hey, I really appreciate this. Thank you.” Okay, great.

That’s exactly what you would expect. He thanks you, he returns the money.

Now let’s imagine, same situation, you see him two days later. Not only does he return the money and thank you, but he gives you a bar of chocolate, and he says, “Look, I really appreciate what you’ve done for me by lending me that money. And on my way out of the café where I was eating lunch, they were selling these chocolate bars, so I decided to buy one for you.”

“Yeah, okay, I didn’t expect that. But, wow, you didn’t have to do that. That’s really nice of you. Thank you. I love chocolate.”

Okay, so that’s beyond what is expected, but it’s not over the top. What would be over the top? Okay, here’s an example. Same situation, you see the guy. He comes back to you. He gives you the money. He’s so thankful. Then he gives you a hug, he starts crying, and he gives you a bottle of champagne. He goes on and on explaining how thankful he is. Whoa, now I’m starting to feel a little uncomfortable with this. Why are you doing this? This is way beyond what he should be doing, which is simply thanking me and returning the money. That’s over the top. Whoa, this is over the top, right? That’s an example of how you would use that phrase, over the top.

1. pales in comparison

Okay, we’re moving on here, ‘pales in comparison.’ We’re talking about people who have turned over a new leaf in their life, and Dan asked me, “Do you know someone who’s went through a dramatic transformation in their life.” And I say, “Yeah, I do, but it pales in comparison to what Shon and Tarra did with their lives.

The change of the people that I know pales in comparison to these amazing people and the changes they went through.

So what does that mean? Well, let’s take a look at the word pale. As an adjective it just means light or soft or muted, when we’re talking about color, or kind of a lack of color. People look pale in the face when they’re sick, or if they’re shocked at something, or if they’re just not feeling well, if they’re feeling queasy or sick to their stomach. They often, their face loses color. We say they have a pale face, or they look pale. But pale can also mean kind of inferior, or of lesser quality. Like a pale attempt at helping someone, a pale attempt at thanking someone, a pale version of the original. These are ways we might use that.

But ‘to pale’ as a verb means to become less important, or to seem, I think that’s important, to seem less valuable or less important. For example, Japan is cold in the winter. It’s a four-season country, it’s cold in the winter, but the level of coldness pales in comparison to how cold it is in Siberia. It just pales in comparison. It’s not even close to how cold it is in Siberia, in Russia.

Cooking, I like cooking. I love cooking. I don’t have much time to cook these days, but I love cooking. And I feel like some of the dishes I make are really delicious and attractive looking, but my level of skill and ability in cooking pales in comparison to professional chefs who have trained for many years. Their ability to cook is way beyond mine. It’s not even close to comparing, so my abilities pale in comparison to professional chefs.

1. to out (someone)

Okay, a few more here. The next is ‘out him.’ Dan’s saying, “I know this guy that I went to college with, and he was a real jerk, but I won’t out him by name.” What does that mean, to out someone? Well, to out someone simply means to reveal information about them without their permission, or even against their will, and it’s usually like secret information or private information that they might not necessarily want you to share with other people, and you do it anyway. You’re outing them. You’re revealing their name. You’re revealing something secret about them. And that could cause them embarrassment, when you out someone.

It has social consequences.

So to out someone, you ought to be careful about that. Dan doesn’t want to name this guy in case someone who’s listening happens to know him. And then that could cause him embarrassment. It can make him angry, so we wouldn’t want to do that. He doesn’t want to out him.

So sometimes, yeah, you have to be careful, specially using social media, that you don’t out someone inadvertently. Sometimes we do it without realizing that we’re doing it. We have to be aware when communicating, especially this day and age, the digital age. To be careful not to out people we know, or people we care about, or even people we don’t know. It’s just out of common human courtesy not to out other people, respect their privacy.

1. suss out

Okay, the last one is ‘suss out.’ Okay, suss out, this is a phrasal verb. What does that mean to suss out something? Dan is saying, when I arrived as a student, this guy had been in Japan for a month, and he’d already sussed out all of this used loot, meaning used things that are valuable, that you could pick up off the streets, like television sets, furniture, et cetera.

And that’s true, actually, back 30 years ago in the time of the bubble, and even in the ’90s, Japanese people would throw out perfectly good furniture, perfectly good electronics that were nothing wrong with them. They were just a few years old, and they wanted something new. So you could go down to the local garbage dumping area, and it’s like going shopping and everything’s free. I actually furnished my first room in Japan that way, in the late ’90s.

That never happens today. I mean, nowadays, in Japan you could go to like used shops that sell used goods, but you’ll never find stuff like that on the street anymore. Things have changed.

So, anyway, what does suss out mean? Suss out means to investigate, to research, to come to understand something. It takes effort to do it, and you end up having some kind of knowledge that others don’t easily have. And it helps you in some way. It’s kind of like having special knowledge of something.

So this guy comes to Japan, and there’s no book or website that shows you where all the garbage dumping places are. He has to go find them. He has to look around. He has to ask around. And eventually, in doing that he is sussing out where the best places are to get garbage that is very useful to him. He sussed out all the areas, and he has that knowledge, and he can teach it, if he wants to, to newcomers, to people who come in new.

That brings us to the end of this lesson. I hope you found it useful, and if you have any questions please do ask us. You can post them in the forum, or email us directly. Okay, take care.