03/20/2010 - 6:05 pm
Posted in Catch Word | 2 comments
Have you ever spent a lot of money on something and then felt that it was too much money? Then you may have felt ripped off! In this episode, we look at the differences between a rip off and to be ripped off. We also examine the expression highway robbery. We also look at [...]
01/31/2010 - 10:18 pm
Posted in Catch Word | 7 comments
Are you a chicken? In this episode we look at a familiar word but show you how it can be used in another way. Most of you probably know that a chicken is a kind of bird. And you can also probably imagine a chicken dinner. There is another funny way that we use chicken [...]
01/24/2010 - 12:39 am
Posted in Curious Questions | 1 comment
Dude! This word is very popular nowadays, especially with young people. You can often hear this word in movies and television shows, or with your Native English speaker friends. It has been around for awhile but young people are using the word dude, more and more. So…dude, what does it mean?
Maura: You want to [...]
09/26/2009 - 9:06 pm
Posted in Catch Word | 2 comments
If you bite off more than you can chew things might be difficult for you. This expression might sound like it is talking about eating but – don’t be fooled – it is not. Another expression with a similar meaning is to get in over your head. You can use both of these expressions when [...]
08/16/2009 - 12:21 pm
Posted in Chatterbox | 4 comments
Moheb is joining the Culips team and helping us create an online writing course (We will let you know as soon as we start taking students!), so we wanted to introduce him to you. We talk a bit about his interesting experiences in Egypt, the U.S. and Canada. Can anyone hear a difference between [...]
08/8/2009 - 9:52 pm
Posted in Catch Word | 4 comments
Of course we all need to push some buttons to turn on a computer or our MP3 players. But to push someone’s buttons has a very different meaning from that literal meaning. In fact, it’s usually not a good idea to push someone’s buttons! In this episode, we look at three expressions, to push buttons, [...]
08/1/2009 - 1:22 pm
Posted in Catch Word | 1 comment
If you want to tell someone to keep something a secret or promise to keep a secret for someone else you can use this expression: mum’s the word. At first it seems like a strange expression…mum is the word? Weird. But you will see it is not so complicated when we explain the possible origin [...]
06/21/2009 - 12:10 am
Posted in Chatterbox | 2 comments
Sometimes we don’t want to be rude and so we need to tell a little white lie. Other times it may be important to be completely honest, and this is called brutal honesty. When is it OK to tell a white lie and when is it necessary to be brutally honest? Harp and Maura discuss [...]
06/13/2009 - 2:48 pm
Posted in Catch Word | 3 comments
Sometimes studying another language is really hard. We wish we could just get it over with and speak the language well. That is today’s expression to get something over with. We usually use this expression when we have an obligation to do something that we don’t want to do. We use the examples of homework [...]
05/30/2009 - 9:23 pm
Posted in Catch Word | No comments
Sometimes it is not easy to get what we want. What we want could be a job or tickets to a really popular show. In these cases, sometimes we can pull strings to get what we want. When people pull some strings, they use power to get what they want. Is it fair to pull [...]
03/20/2009 - 3:17 am
sound like robin had a cold here , or you are still not recovery it from the wasted state