Episode 0142
Summary
The audio captures a couple getting ready for a dinner party. Speaker 1 is impatient, urging Speaker 2 to hurry up. Speaker 2 is indecisive about his outfit, presenting a questionable choice of clothing for the occasion, which frustrates Speaker 1. Speaker 1 then provides specific instructions for an appropriate outfit, and Speaker 2 accepts the advice, then asks about his hair.
Transcript (Click timestamp to jump)
Honey, come on. We're going to be late. Honestly, you take longer getting ready than I do.
I was drying my hair and ironing my shirt. Can you come here for a sec? I need your help.
What is it? Why are all these clothes on the bed?
I don't know what to wear. Okay. Give me your opinion. Do you like the way this looks? The striped short sleeve shirt with this checkered sweater in my lucky sandals.
I like the cut and hemline of these shorts, so I think I'll wear these as well.
Are you joking? What am I going to do with you? We're going to a dinner party, not to the beach.
Wear the shirt with the silk tie I bought you, and those corduroy pants. It's chilly outside, so you can wear this coat.
Thanks, honey. You have such great fashion sense. Now, what am I going to do with my hair?
Summary
This audio is a podcast episode from EnglishPod where the hosts, Marco and Catherine, discuss clothing and fashion. They introduce vocabulary related to getting dressed, such as 'to iron,' 'sandals,' 'short-sleeved shirt,' 'checkered,' 'silk tie,' and 'corduroy pants.' The core of the episode revolves around a humorous dialogue between a husband and wife, where the wife expresses frustration because her husband is taking too long to get ready for a dinner party and has chosen an outfit lacking fashion sense. The hosts then analyze common phrases related to this scenario and delve into fashion sense, ending with a discussion about global fashion trends and the high cost of designer clothing.
Transcript (Click timestamp to jump)
Hello everyone, welcome back to another lesson with us here at EnglishPod. My name is Marco.
My name is Catherine and that's us.
And that's us. And today we're gonna talk about a very common situation when you when you're a couple, when you have girlfriends.
Honey, come on. I wanna go.
Are you, do you think?
You are taking forever.
All right, who takes long? Like, do you take a long time to get ready, to get dressed?
Okay, I take longer to get ready, but my boyfriend takes longer in general because he's like checking his email, playing video games, like, just, you know, we, we call it lollygagging. He's just like being kind of slow.
I I'm the opposite. I usually I usually start getting ready later, like if we have to leave at 9:00, I'll start getting ready at 8:30, but I'll be ready by 9:00 because I I take a shower real fast, get dressed and I know what I'm gonna wear and all my clothes are ready. But on the other hand, my girlfriend takes forever to get ready and she's like, oh, and then, you know, the hair, the
Girls have makeup and tights and
But this is what I understand. If we're supposed to leave at 9:00, why don't you start getting ready before?
Never underestimate. I don't know.
Procrastination.
Hey, it's not even about procrastination. Sometimes it just takes longer to look good than other times.
Right. Well, in this case, we're gonna be looking at a lesson where it's the opposite. The husband is taking a long time to get ready and well, I don't think he has a very good fashion sense, right?
He does not. And we're gonna learn what that phrase means in a minute here, but before we get going, we've got a couple of words to preview to help you understand what's going on in today's dialogue.
Vocabulary preview.
All right. So, um, vocabulary preview today, we have two words. Uh, the first one can be a noun or a verb, to iron or iron.
Huh.
So, uh, to iron, basically means to
To get the wrinkles out of clothes. And so we use this iron is actually a metal. It's a very uh important metal. And uh an iron is a a machine that we plug in, we use it to get the wrinkles, the lines out of our our shirts and our skirts and everything. And so it's actually a very important thing to make sure that you look nice and put together.
Right. So you use an iron to iron your shirt or to iron your skirt. And uh then we have sandals, my favorite type of shoe.
Mine too. Sandals.
I have a friend who used to say she had claustrophobic feet. Her feet didn't like to be in closed spaces and so she only wore sandals.
So these are uh open shoes, open toe shoes, basically. You wear them at the beach.
Or you wear them in the summer in general. I'm wearing sandals right now.
And uh you have different types of sandals like sandals and flip-flops, right?
Flip-flops. I think they're called that because they sound like flip-flop, flip-flop.
When you walk. All right. So those are our two words today. Let's listen to the dialogue for the first time and then we'll be back.
Honey, come on. We're going to be late. Honestly, you take longer getting ready than I do.
I was drying my hair and ironing my shirt. Can you come here for a sec? I need your help.
What is it? Why are all these clothes on the bed?
I don't know what to wear. Okay. Give me your opinion. Do you like the way this looks? The striped short sleeve shirt with this checkered sweater and my lucky sandals. I like the cut and hemline of these shorts, so I think I'll wear these as well.
Are you joking? What am I going to do with you? We are going to a dinner party, not to the beach. Wear the shirt with the silk tie I bought you and those corduroy pants. It's chilly outside, so you can wear this coat.
Thanks, honey. You have such great fashion sense. Now, what am I going to do with my hair?
All right, we're back. So um, interesting, this uh husband, sounded a lot like a famous president, I think.
He did, but we'll get to that in a minute. Before we do, uh talk about who this guy is, I think it'd be a great idea to talk about some of these clothing terms because they're very useful for when you want to go shopping and for when you're getting dressed.
Language takeaway.
Okay, so the first word that we have on language takeaway is striped.
All right, you might have heard the American flag called stars and stripes. Stripes are those lines on clothing or on flags that go up or down or left and right.
Exactly. So you have a, if you have a striped shirt, you have many lines on your shirt that are going up and down or left and right.
Right. And they say with fashion, lines that go left to right make you look fatter and lines that go up and down make you look thinner.
And taller.
And taller.
Very good. And uh now moving on, if it's summer and you want to wear a shirt, you can wear a short-sleeved shirt.
All right, this is important. So most people like to wear short sleeve shirts in the summertime because they're cooler. Uh and in the wintertime that means we like to wear long-sleeved shirts.
Okay, so the sleeves are basically the arms of the shirt. So you say short-sleeved.
Very good.
And then we have a checkered shirt or a checkered sweater in this case.
Okay, so checkered means there are um little squares on the shirt and usually one square is one color and the next square is another color. So it looks like a checkerboard.
Very good. That game, you know, checkers.
Or like a chessboard. Exactly. And so in this case, we've got a guy who's trying to wear a striped shirt and a checkered sweater.
That does not go well together, right? No.
No. Too much stuff happening. Too busy. Too busy.
All right. And not only that, but he wanted to wear um shorts because he liked the cut and the hemline.
Okay, these are actually terms that we normally use with women's clothing because uh you could say, I like the cut of this dress. I like the the shape that it has. Um and hemline is the bottom of your skirt or your trousers or your shorts. And hemline we could say, my mother used to say this to me, the hemline is much too high. Much too short. That skirt is not appropriate. Yeah. So it's nice to have a hemline at the knee.
All right. So the cut is the shape that the the piece of clothing has, like pants or skirts, and the hemline would be the place where it ends, right? The the skirt for example.
Like it, it pretty much tells you the length of something.
Very good. And and now, well, and now the wife steps in, she's like, no, no, you're not wearing this. She's telling him that she has to wear nice clothes. And among those items is a silk tie.
Okay, so classic Father's Day gift.
Silk tie.
I've given this one a couple of times. A silk tie is a, you know, a necktie, a long necktie that's made of silk.
Silk is a very soft material, right? Very expensive as well.
It can be, especially Italian silk.
And uh I've always actually wanted to have silk sheets.
Ooh, see, I don't know. I feel like they would get very warm in the summer.
Yeah. Well, in the winter it would be awesome, but probably very cool in the winter as well.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know. Well, it's one of those things. And uh and then she's also telling him to wear some corduroy pants.
Okay, so it sounds like this might be a winter dialogue because corduroy is not something you wear in the summer because it's very heavy and thick. Corduroy actually is a fabric that um that usually has these kind of ribs or or ridges. And so there's like little lines in the fabric that make it quite thick and um rough when you almost, not rough, but they make it feel very unique when you touch it.
Yeah, it's not smooth. It's a little bit rough, the the fabric.
Yeah.
Very good. So, those are all the the clothing items that we've looked at today. There's a lot of them and obviously we'll post a couple of pictures on on the site so you can see uh and so you can see better what a silk tie looks like or especially corduroy pants.
Corduroy, yeah.
All right. So uh let's listen to this dialogue again. We're gonna slow it down a little bit and then we'll come back and look at some of the phrases.
Honey, come on. We're going to be late. Honestly, you take longer getting ready than I do.
I was drying my hair and ironing my shirt. Can you come here for a sec? I need your help.
What is it? Why are all these clothes on the bed?
I don't know what to wear. Okay. Give me your opinion. Do you like the way this looks? The striped short sleeve shirt with this checkered sweater and my lucky sandals. I like the cut and hemline of these shorts, so I think I'll wear these as well.
Are you joking? What am I going to do with you? We are going to a dinner party, not to the beach. Wear the shirt with the silk tie I bought you and those corduroy pants. It's chilly outside, so you can wear this coat.
Thanks, honey. You have such great fashion sense. Now, what am I going to do with my hair?
All right, we're back. So uh now let's start with fluency builder.
Fluency builder.
Okay, these are classic couple phrases, right? These are phrases you hear among couples and the first one is maybe more common to hear from the female end, but it's not unknown on the male end. So we have this question.
Do you like the way this looks?
So, while this while the person is saying this, they would maybe like be moving to the side a little bit, like, do you like the way this looks? So, basically, you're saying, do you like what I'm wearing? Does it look good on me?
Does it look good exactly. You could also say, hey, I like the way this looks. When you're trying to buy something at the store. And so, do you like the way this looks is a way for you to ask the other person's opinion of how you look.
And also another common phrase, especially with men who have no uh no fashion sense. The wife says, what am I going to do with you?
Okay, this is an interesting phrase and it needs some explanation, I think, because uh the meaning is, well, this is very difficult, right? So, you're being difficult, or wow, you need some help from me. I'm gonna help you.
Yeah. How am I going to help you this much or all the time like this?
Right. Because she's pretty much saying he has no idea about clothing and fashion. So she he's saying to her, what am she's saying to him, what am I going to do with you? Means you need so much help.
Seriously. All right, so uh and and the third phrase that we that we saw and we said at the very beginning is fashion sense.
Okay, so this is actually what the man needs help with. Fashion sense. He needs help with his fashion sense because he has zero fashion sense. And this is pretty much a way to say, um, how much someone knows about fashion or appearances. And so I can say, you know, oh, my friend, Kathy, she has amazing fashion sense. So she always looks good.
Right. So combining colors appropriately or wearing the right types of shoes with the right types of clothing, etcetera, fashion sense.
Or even just being able to wear things that are good on her or telling other people what's good on them. Um so fashion sense is the ability to uh to identify fashion and look good and make other people look good.
All right, very good.
Let's listen to this dialogue for the very last time and uh we'll come back and talk a little bit more about fashion because it's a very interesting topic.
It is.
Honey, come on. We're going to be late. Honestly, you take longer getting ready than I do.
I was drying my hair and ironing my shirt. Can you come here for a sec? I need your help.
What is it? Why are all these clothes on the bed?
I don't know what to wear. Okay. Give me your opinion. Do you like the way this looks? The striped short sleeve shirt with this checkered sweater and my lucky sandals. I like the cut and hemline of these shorts, so I think I'll wear these as well.
Are you joking? What am I going to do with you? We are going to a dinner party, not to the beach. Wear the shirt with the silk tie I bought you and those corduroy pants. It's chilly outside, so you can wear this coat.
Thanks, honey. You have such great fashion sense. Now, what am I going to do with my hair?
All right, we're back. Uh you lived in Italy for a while. How is the fashion over there? Is it extreme like we see on the runways? Because I honestly don't understand fashion.
Well, the thing about runways is that that's not how normal people dress. Well, yeah, that's what I understand. Why do they have these fashion shows if people don't really buy these types of clothing? Well, sometimes people like stores, for example, big stores, department stores will buy fashions off of the runway and they'll kind of change them a little bit so that they're more appropriate for normal consumption. That means for normal people who want to wear them. Um, but the runway fashions are actually they're kind of like exaggerations of trends that will happen in in the shopping world, right? In the commercial world. So, the things that you see are like big, blown-up exaggerations and we take bits and pieces of those in our daily lives to dress up. So, different colors or fabrics or like oftentimes you see kind of military outfits and so that will translate into military jackets that are very popular one, one season. And so Italy definitely counts as a very fashionable country, but it's not crazy people. You, every once in a while you see someone with crazy clothes, but I think Japan is much more crazy as far as style.
Yeah. Actually, yeah. Asian countries such as Japan or uh South Korea, they have very also unique fashion as well, but um it's very uh extreme to a certain point and the color combinations they do is like red sneakers with green pants and like a blue jacket. It's very crazy.
Right. And very bright. And you often see these shoes, you know, we call them platform shoes. They're it's kind of like you're standing on a brick or on a book. And they're, you know, they're 7 in tall and you see these little girls when these big shoes and I just I'm so scared when I see them because I feel like they're gonna fall over.
The other thing is that fashion is so expensive if you actually want to buy uh something that's in like an authentic uh, I don't know, Carolina Herrera or uh Oscar de la Renta or something like that. It's so expensive.
It is, but you know, high fashion is expensive. Um, fashion is not, doesn't have to be. You can, you can be fashionable just looking at, um, different stores and going to second-hand shops and making your own clothes. I mean, it's all about a sense of personal style and dressing yourself to be unique.
Or you can get it at the fake market.
Or you can go to the fake market. Exactly.
All right, that's all the time we have for today, guys. I hope uh you enjoyed this lesson. Please come to our website and comment at englishpod.com. And if you have any other suggestions or maybe your own pictures of crazy fashion, you can post, we're glad to see them. So uh we'll see you guys there.
Yeah, as Marco said, hope to see on the website. That's about it for today. So, goodbye, everyone. Bye.
Summary
This audio is an English vocabulary review focusing on clothing-related terms. It presents definitions, then the vocabulary word, followed by a quicker review session, and finally, the word used in example sentences. Key terms covered include sneakers, striped, checkered, polka dot, sandal, denim, cut, out of fashion, hemline, tailor, dinner party, corduroy, and fashion sense.
Transcript (Click timestamp to jump)
The English Pod audio review.
Listen to the meaning, then say the vocabulary word.
Casual tennis shoes.
Sneakers.
Having stripes or bands of color.
Striped.
A pattern with alternating squares.
Checkered.
A fabric pattern with many circles.
Polka dot.
A type of footwear with open toes.
Sandal.
A type of fabric used to make jeans.
Denim.
The shape and style of a piece of clothing.
Cut.
Used to describe something that is no longer popular.
Out of fashion.
The line formed by the lower edge of clothing.
Hemline.
A person who makes clothes adjust the fit.
Tailor.
An event where you eat at a friend's house.
Dinner party.
A ribbed cotton clothing material.
Corduroy.
An idea for what clothing looks good.
Fashion sense.
Let's try that faster.
A type of fabric used to make jeans.
Denim.
A type of footwear with open toes.
Sandal.
A ribbed cotton clothing material.
Corduroy.
A person who makes clothes adjust the fit.
Tailor.
Used to describe something that is no longer popular.
Out of fashion.
Having stripes or bands of color.
Striped.
An idea for what clothing looks good.
Fashion sense.
The line formed by the lower edge of clothing.
Hemline.
The shape and style of a piece of clothing.
Cut.
A pattern with alternating squares.
Checkered.
An event where you eat at a friend's house.
Dinner party.
A fabric pattern with many circles.
Polka dot.
Casual tennis shoes.
Sneakers.
Now say the word and hear it in a sentence.
Striped.
The zebra has strong black and white striping for confusing predators.
Striped.
It is never a good idea to wear a striped shirt with checkered pants.
Striped.
Uncle Joe took me down to the pond to fish for striped bass.
Checkered.
A black and white checkered flag is often used to signal the end of a race.
Checkered.
Chess is always played on a checkered board.
Checkered.
We were all unaware of the man's checkered past. Nobody knew he just got out of jail.
Cut.
The cut of men's suits has changed considerably over the years.
Cut.
She was not pleased with the cut of her wedding dress, so now it must be redone.
Cut.
Michael is such a dependable employee. They really like the cut of his jib.
Dinner party.
Another dinner party! Why can't we ever eat at home with our own family?
Dinner party.
It is always a good idea to bring a bottle of wine or a dessert when attending a dinner party.
Dinner party.
James made a fool of himself at the dinner party when he tried to show off his new magic tricks.
Fashion sense.
You have no fashion sense whatsoever. Just look at what you are wearing.
Fashion sense.
Fashion sense is not something you can learn by imitating others. You either have it or you don't.
Fashion sense.
Trendy styles and fads should not influence your sense of fashion.