Common Idioms in Everyday English
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Gold Forest English podcast. My name is Jordan and today I want to talk a little bit about idioms.
So idioms are very…very common in English, especially in spoken English, in Britain. Idioms are sentences - phrases that people say, which have a specific meaning. They've got a special meaning for this phrase, this sentence and the meaning is kind of uh visual imagination. So I'll give you an example…
A very common idiom is break the ice. Break the ice. So this idiom it means to make a social situation more comfortable for example, you have just met some new people, maybe at work or in university or something like that. You're in a new group of people that you don't know. And when you're meeting a group of people you don't know, it can be a bit uncomfortable. It can be a bit awkward. There's some silences… so often people will try to break the ice. They will try and make the situation feel more comfortable normally with some… maybe a game or activity or some questions that help people to get to know each other, and feel a little bit more relaxed. So we we have this idiom of break the ice. In this situation, the ice is the frozen cold social situation. You're feeling cold and uncomfortable and it's kind of like frozen. Everybody is quiet and doesn't want to talk. It's frozen like ice and we want to break the ice. We want to stop this awkward, uncomfortable silence and re feel relaxed. We want to feel comfortable with these new people. So that's an example of an idiom. We have this phrase that is kind of visual. We can imagine breaking the ice and in the situation, the ice is the social thing.
So another very common, famous idiom. There are lots of people use is piece of cake. piece of cake is a very common idiom and you might have heard it before. It means that something is very, very easy to do. um so we use it to say oh, the exam was a piece of cake. That meeting, that presentation, that task was a piece of cake. It was very easy to do, so we we talk about something as a piece of cake when it's very easy and you thought it was going to be difficult, but actually it wasn't. Maybe this is similar to eating a piece of cake eating a piece of cake is very easy to do. You can do it by accident. It feels you.. you enjoy it and it doesn't feel hard work at all. Sometimes some food can be a bit difficult to eat because maybe it's not very enjoyable, but cake is so enjoyable that it's very easy to eat. So maybe that's the visual connection of eating and enjoying this piece of cake, something very easy.
Another common example of an idiom is to be on the same page as somebody. If you are on the same page as someone, it means that you agree, you have the same idea, you have the same point of view, you have the same understanding in for example, in business, we want to be on the same page as the other people in our team with our coworkers, we want to have the same understanding, the same point of view, so it's easier to work together. If you are not on the same page, you are not on the same page. It can cause lots of problems and misunderstandings when you are having different viewpoints, different ideas about the same thing and they don't agree, so we are on the same page same ideas and same information.
So these are three very common idioms break the ice to be creating a awkward situation to be more comfortable, making this awkward, uncomfortable silence to be more comfortable and social. The second - piece of cake, very, very easy thing describes something that's very easy to do and then on the same page to be equal in your understanding of something. Multiple people have the same opinions and ideas about a topic. They are on the same page.
So these are three very common idioms. If you want to know some more, I have a blog post on the Gold Forest website. A full blog post with 10 different idioms and some practice exercises to go with it if you want to check out our full blog post and there will also be an image on our Instagram for a couple of these idioms as well.
All right. Well, thank you very much for listening. I hope you've had a nice day or you are having a nice day and I will talk to you again next week. Thank you very much goodbye.