A few weeks ago one of my students brought me some phrases. She couldn't really work out what they meant, and the context wasn't helping. I was very quickly able to work out that the writer she was reading was using only half an idiom. Helpful! So today let's take a look at a couple of these examples so you can see what might happen when a native speaker isn't thinking about all the hard working international speakers of English out there!

The idioms we'll cover today are:

Spill the beans/Tea - to tell a secret or gossip

Not my circus, not my monkeys - to say we're not getting involved in something because it's not our business or not related to us

Additional Vocabulary

to gloss over something - phrasal verb - to quickly cover over something, to carry on as if nothing happened

clarification - to make something clearer or easier to understand

Osmosis - this is a biological function where cells can pass through a membrane, however, we often use it like this to mean we learned something without trying and in the natural course of our life. This is a common colloquial use of this word.

All the way back in Episode 4 I covered the idiom 'Spill the Beans' I also cover a lot of other common English idioms in this episode.

In Episode 37 I shared how Shakespeare influenced English and in Episode 38 I covered some vocabulary and idioms that we can track back to Shakespeare.

#emmaseslenglish #learningenglishidioms #english #englishidiomsandphrases #idioms