Hello, everyone. Nesse episódio do podcast Inglês Online eu falo sobre algumas expressões em inglês com o verbo lose, como a que quer dizer “ele perdeu a cabeça”.

Transcrição

Hello! 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.

Today I’m going to talk about the word lose. Remember? Lose? That’s what you may use when you can’t find your keys. “I’ve lost my keys”. So you may remember that lost is the past tense and also the past participle of the verb lose. So I’m gonna talk about a couple of expressions and I’m gonna use lose and lost in the examples.

So picture this: imagine someone who has been under a lot of stress lately. Let’s say it’s your boss. He’s lost two great employees recently; he’s going through a divorce; his kid has been getting in trouble in school; and to top it off some big clients have been canceling orders. The atmosphere in your department is pretty tense… you can tell your boss is getting more irritated and impatient by the minute and you’re not sure how much longer he’s gonna be able to keep it together.

Well, not much longer as it turns out. It’s 3PM now and you just stepped out of a meeting with your boss and the VP of Finance, a woman named, let’s say, Tina. Tina came with some bad news: she said there are going to be budget cuts that are going to especially affect the advertising budget. That’s when your boss lost it. He was counting on the advertising budget. He was planning on hiring a new ad agency to try and get some big new clients. So when Tina gave him the news about the budget cuts, he just lost it.

Your boss lost it. What does that mean? That means he lost control of his emotions; he lost his temper, he got really, really angry. He lost it. His face turned red and he raised his voice as he said “So tell me, how am I supposed to recover sales without decent advertising! There’s only so much that can be done with no advertising budget! Who do you think I am, a magician? Am I supposed to perform a miracle? Should I ask my staff to chip in so we can hire a stupid ad agency?” And then your boss stormed out of the room. Your boss completely lost it when Tina gave him the news of the budget cuts.

Have you ever lost it? In public? How often do you lose it? Hopefully not that often ’cause that might make your life a bit hard… And by the way, we say “he lost it”, “she lost it”, also to communicate that that person simply lost control of their emotions… it doens’t mean necessarily that that person became very angry; it could be that he or she became so moved by something they were witnessing that they started to cry. That person might say “My friend was telling me about everything he went through. I was so touched I just lost it and started crying.” I just lost it and started to cry… what does that mean? I lost control of my emotions; I couldn’t control myself any longer so I started to cry. I lost it.

Did you notice I used the expression “lost his temper” about a minute ago? I said that “your boss lost his temper”. That’s another very common expression with lose. Many of you may already be familiar with it. When we say someone lost their temper we’re just saying this person got really angry, usually at someone else. Do you know people who lose their temper often?

And here’s another one with lose just to wrap things up. Gamers will immediately get what I’m saying here. As will compulsive readers.