Hi, everybody!

O podcast de hoje fala sobre duas expressões em inglês e tem uma participação especial: Keith é um amigo britânico que mora na Califórnia há anos e esteve no Brasil não faz muito tempo. É lógico que eu pedi para ele dar uma canja, e ele acabou falando um pouco sobre as expressões de hoje (e outras que talvez apareçam no futuro). Keith fala na velocidade natural dele – mas, como sempre, você pode acompanhar tudo na transcrição e ouvir meus exemplos também.

Transcrição

Hi, this is Ana with a new episode of inglesonline podcast. To download this podcast or see a transcript of the audio, go to inglesonline.com.br and click the category Podcast Inglesonline on the sidebar.

So my friend Keith… that’s K-e-i-t-h, Keith. Keith dropped by a couple of weeks ago and I asked him to talk about English expressions for our next podcast. Besides being a really nice guy, Keith is a native speaker from England who has been living in California for over ten years, where he works as a firefighter.

So he said yes and in this episode you’ll listen to him explaining the meaning of two expressions. The first one is more like a proverb, or a saying: The squeaky wheel gets the oil. So what is a squeaky wheel? Well, picture a bicycle, which obviously has two wheels… and every once in a while one of the wheels will start making a sound like this (sound of a squeaky wheel)

That’s the sound of a squeaky wheel, probably not a bicycle… but you get the idea. Now if you have ever had a bicycle, you know that a little oil can make that squeaky noise go away.

So here’s the expression again: the squeaky wheel gets the oil. Now listen to Keith as he explains its meaning:

This is a famous expression and… what it really means is, for an example… the person that complains the most usually gets, gets their complaint heard, so… It’s like the squeaky wheel. Really, if you think about it, if you have, like a… A car or a little shopping cart… And the one wheel squeaking, it’s the one you’re gonna look at first and get the oil to.

So just as the wheel making the noise will get the oil fast, the person making the most noise, or complaining the most, will be heard fast. I don’t know if that’s always true, but that’s what the proverb means.

And the second expression is “cut your losses”, so let’s hear what Keith has to say about this one:

Another common saying is “you should cut your losses”. It can be used… You know, things aren’t just working out well for you and you decide that I’m just gonna stop now as opposed to carry on whatever the problem might be. So you say, yeah I’m just gonna cut my losses now.

So let’s say you just bought a used computer for 700 and you’re happy because you didn’t have a lot of money to spend and the computer was cheap. However, on the very same day you turn it on and you try to use it, only to find out it is not working. So you take it back to the computer shop where you bought it, and they tell you that unfortunately you’re gonna have to spend another 300 to get it fixed. You decide to go ahead and pay them to fix it because… 700 + 300 is a thousand and it’s still on the cheap side.

So, after a few days you pick it up at the shop but now when you turn it on, it makes this really loud noise. You take it back to the shop and they tell you that now you have to spend another 250 and then it will definitely be in top condition.

But by now you don’t trust them anymore, and you get the feeling that this is going nowhere and you’re just wasting money. So you say to yourself, I’d better cut my losses now and get rid of this junk!

So, what about you? Can you remember a situation where you decided to cut your losses before t...