Hi, all. Nesse episódio do podcast Inglês Online falamos sobre mais dois ditados muito populares em inglês, desta vez ligados às consequências de nossos atos.

Transcrição

Hello, everybody. How’s it going? Today we have a new episode of the inglesonline podcast. To download or just listen to other episodes and download transcripts, go to inglesonline.com.br and click Podcast Inglesonline.

Our episode today is dedicated to a couple of very popular sayings in English. The first one is What goes around, comes around. Think of a boomerang. When you throw a boomerang, it kinda makes a u-turn and flies back at you, or at least near you, right? That’s kind of the principle behind this saying: what goes around, comes around.

People usually use this saying to mean basically that if you’re bad, bad things will happen to you, and if you’re good, good things will happen to you. So let’s say you’re telling your friend Sara what happened at the office last week. You were in a meeting with your boss, who reports to the company CEO, and you watched how the CEO chewed your boss out right there in front of everyone. And what’s really weird about it is, the CEO is usally such a calm, slow-to-anger kind of guy! Not last week, though. He raised his voice and proceeded to scold your boss. Now, you’ve been working for this guy for a year and the thing is, he has the habit of scolding employees in front of everyone else!

When your friend hears that, she says “What goes around, comes around. He’s been such a jerk to his employees; now it’s his turn to be yelled at”. So he yelled a lot at his employees; now the CEO is yelling at him and scolding him. What goes around, comes around. Here’s another example: you friend Mark tells you that he had a neighbor who kept throwing trash on Mark’s backyard. Mark confronted him and he denied it. This morning, however, someone dumped a lot of trash on his garden and ruined the flowers! You could say “What goes around… comes around”. This guy dumped a lot of trash on Mark’s garden, but now it is his turn. Someone did the same thing to him, and he’s not happy! What goes around, comes around.

And this is the perfect example to introduce our second expression today. You know what else we could say about Mark’s neighbor? Here it goes: we could say that he got a taste of his own medicine. Again: Mark’s neighbor got a taste of his own medicine. What does that mean? Well, this expression means that Mark’s neighbor was doing something unpleasant to Mark, and now someone’s doing the same thing to him, so he can have a “taste” of that unpleasant thing he was doing. And just to clarify: “medicine”, here, means “drug”, but not that bad kind of drug. “Medicine” here means the kind of drug people take in order to heal a disease.

And what about my initial example, where Sara’s boss got scolded by the CEO? Remember I said he had the habit of doing just that to his employees?  Well, when the CEO yelled at him in front of all his employees, he got a taste of his own medicine. You know when someone keeps doing something unpleasant, or bad, and then all of a sudden they become the victim of that same thing they were doing? That’s when you can say They got a taste of their own medicine.

So please give us your example in the comments. Can you remember any examples from your own life where someone had a taste of their own medicine? Talk to you next time.

 

Key expressions

* What goes around, comes around

* get a taste of his/her/your/etc. medicine

 

Glossary