Category Archives: From friends

As a non-native English speaker, it is fun to learn new English expressions from friends. I am not afraid of asking questions to my friends. Luckily, my friends are so nice that they always do their bests to explain to me. Thank you, all!

20 Mar

shack up

Who taught: Patty, Amber and Tami

shacking up

Shacking up (source: http://www.cartoonstock.com/)

Hello there, my friends! It’s been more than a week without a new post. Sorry about that!

I was in San Francisco for a biz trip last week with my colleagues. Unfortunately, we did not have usual Californian sunshine but rain the whole week. But, we got to visit a few great companies and meet great people. We used public transportation a lot. During the time we sit in a Caltrain, we had a lot of talks about random things.

For some reason, we started to talk about me not wearing my wedding ring. Jessy also does not wear a ring. She actually does not have it at all. As we were talking about it, Patty said, “So, you guys are shacking up.”

Of course, I did not get what she said. Shack is a small and sort of dirty hut built from wood. Jessy and I bought a house and I can say that it is not just a shack in my opinion. Then, what is shacking up and what does it have to do with marriage or wedding ring?

If you shack up with someone, that means you guys live together (often while having sex) but not married. Why there is shack? My guess is that living together with someone else without marrying happens when people are young and, at that age, they cannot afford a nice place to live together. They usually end up being in a place like a shack. Don’t you think so?

So, literally, you live together in a shack which is “shacking up.” What do you think, my American friends? Am I right?

By the way, Jessy and I are not shacking up. We have been legally married for more than 10 years.

08 Mar

butt dial vs booty call

Who taught: Carol and Alan

butt dial

butt dial (source: http://aiminglow.com/)

A few days ago, Carol forwarded me a tweet by AlanHungover.

His tweet says:

My Grandpa confused the term “butt dial” with “booty call.” I almost fainted when he said “I booty called your mother last night.”

I already mentioned about the expression, booty call. If you do not remember, here is the link to my old post.

What is butt dial? Have you ever gotten a phone call but the one who makes the call does not speak at all but you keep hearing noises? That is probably due to butt dialing. You would have probably made that kind of call in the past too. Usually, it happens when you put your cell phone in your back pocket and sit down in a chair or a sofa. So, it is not a horrible thing to do. On the other hand, booty call is not considered to be a good thing. Well, it depends, I guess.

As I already mentioned in the old post, booty actually means butt. Call and dial mean the same thing. In that sense, it is not impossible to confuse those two expressions, even for native English speakers.

In reality, they are so different from each other. I would also be very very surprised by my Grandpa, saying “I booty called your mother last night.”

I would be like, “What? What is wrong with my family. My mother is your daughter, Grandpa!”

Anyway, since I heard that story, I feel a lot more comforted because even native English speakers are confused with all of these crazy expressions. I guess I am doing OK. What do you think, my friends? Wait, can I also say butt call to mean butt dial? How about booty dial? Would that be OK?

BTW, you should never forget these two expressions.

01 Mar

The second anniversary of LEfF

Terry Lee

Hello, my friends! How have you been? I am excited to announce that today is the second anniversary of LEfF (Learning English from Friends). This is my 277th post. Time does fly, don’t you think?

Over the past two years, I have done my best to share my experiences learning new expressions. Most of the expressions that I have written here are the ones that would not be taught in English as a Second Language class but still used by many American people. I really hope my blog has been a helpful resource for all of non-native English speakers out there.

 

Let me start with talking about top five most popular posts.

1. black sheep

2. I really appreciate it

3. native American vs native to America

4. bun in the oven

5. what is your brownie point?

I would like to congratulate all of the friends who taught these top five posts (Brian, Jeff, Andrew, Jean, Alex, Sangeetha and Ari). Speaking of these five, I just realized that my sister-in-law has a bun in the oven. It’s been five months. Let me take a moment to congratulate her and her husband!

LEfF has gotten about 85,000 page views (3,541 per month and 117 per day) in two years and they are from 170 countries. That means LEfF got attractions from almost 90% of the earth. That is amazing, isn’t it? Here are some of the country names that I have never heard of : Djibouti, Guernsey, Martinique,… The list goes on and on.

How about top five countries? Here is the list.

1. United States

2. United Kingdom

3. South Korea

4. Canada

5. Japan

Hey, I have another interesting statistic. Do you know what is the number one browser people have used to get to LEfF? It is not Internet Explorer. It is Firefox. Thank God! Please stop using Internet Explorer. It is horrible. Chrome is the third browser but not far behind IE. You can use Chrome. 🙂 In fact, it is my default browser and I like it a lot.

What else? Oh.. it shows that readers use 105 different languages. My analysis is that people do want to learn new English expressions online.

Thank you all for your visits and support! Because of you, I am so happy to come back to my desk to write new interesting expressions. Don’t worry! It will keep updated. There are so many out there that I still do not know or have never heard of. It is like going down the rabbit hole every day.

Please share new posts with your friends so that many people get to have a chance to learn new ones.

See you soon!

 

23 Feb

rediscovering a word series 2: flash

Who taught: Melissa

There are three rivers that run across or around Pittsburgh, PA. And there are more than 29 bridges cross the three rivers in Pittsburgh city boundary. That is a lot of bridges. Don’t you think? Do I know the names of all of the bridges? Not at all! I know a few such as the Liberty Bridge and the Fort Pitt Bridge.

Because of these crazy number of bridges and the three rivers, there is a very interesting aspect of the city. People in the South and the North do not get along with each other. Also, they do not even think about taking a trip to the other side of the town. They stay where they are from. In my opinion, because of this, people from Pittsburgh always come back to the city after a few years of living in other states or cities. They just love the city, or I should say the area they are from, either South or North.

Where do I live? I live the Eastern part of Pittsburgh. Kind of neutrality zone, I guess.

Well, today’s story is about another experience of rediscovering a word for me. Everybody knows what “flash” means. It is a light or something that reflects light that shine in a bright but brief, sudden, or intermittent way. Like camera flash.

That was the only definition I have known till this morning. Today, I was briefly checking my facebook feed and I found a very interesting youtube video shared by Melissa.

The title of the video is “Have you ever flashed someone?” I thought this question should be related with taking a picture at night or something. But then next thing I thought about was what is so interesting about taking a picture at night? Not much, right? So, I decided to watch the video. Oh My …..

What the heck? Flash has that kind of definition? No way! Here I am embedding the video here. You should really watch it to understand it.

Oh.. also, you should watch it till the end. If not, you would not be able to understand what it means. At the end, there is a lady who shows what it means by really doing it.

Hey, have you watched it? If not, watch first. …

………

By now, I assume you did watch it. Do you get it? Can you feel it? Here is the definition of flash: To show an “inappropriate” body part by quickly moving an object or article of clothing out of the way then back “flashing” the part at someone.

So, the thing is I do not think it is “inappropriate” body part if a woman flashes. What do you think, my friend?

 

27 Jan

jump the shark

Who taught: Andrew

Yesterday, my friend, Andrew, came to Carnegie Mellon University to give a talk about “Agile Software Development with Scrum.” I know it might sound all greek to some of you but simply speaking it is a computer science thing.

I was there too. In my opinion, it was a very informative and useful talk. I am sure that students felt the same way.

It was also useful for me in another sense. I learned another expression from Andrew. During his talk, he said this, “Has Agile jumped the shark?” At first, I thought “jump the shark” could mean a good thing. Something like it is so great that even a shark decides to jump out of the water. Well… as Andrew continues his talk, I could feel that the expression does not have positive connotations.

However, I was not get the exact feeling of the expression.

So, I looked it up. Then I realized that the shark is not the one who jumps. It is a person or a thing jumps the shark just like you can see from the youtube video that I included here. The expression is originated from this TV show, Happy Days, that aired from 1974 to 1984.

To be able to feel this expression fully, you should imagine yourself watching a man who is really going to jump a shark. As he is getting closer and closer to the shark, you would feel more and more excited but, once jumping is done, all of the excitement is gone.

Another way you can think of is that you are riding a roller coaster. As it climbs up and up, you feel excitement but once it reaches the bottom the excitement is not there anymore.

“Jump the shark” means a moment when something that was once great has reached a point where it will now decline in quality and popularity. (source: urban dictionary)

Now, I am not sure how many of the students yesterday evening understood the expression because most of them were non-native English speakers. Maybe I should ask them later and teach this expression while I am teaching my regular computer science stuff.