O podcast de hoje mostra como dizer “Foi pego no flagra!”.

Transcrição

Hi, how’s it going? This is Ana Luiza with 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 a few expressions with the word catch. Catch, c-a-t-c-h. I’m also gonna use the past forms of catch: caught and caught. That’s it: catch, caught, caught. I’ve already used an expression with caught in a previous podcast, “caught me off guard”. So today let’s start with “get caught”.

If you’ve ever been in school, you know that during any given exam there’s always someone cheating. Right? That means, there’s always someone looking at a little piece of paper that has stuff written on it that you were supposed to have memorized for the test. Or there’s someone looking for information in a book while the teacher is not looking. Now, some people are really good at that. They cheat on every test, and they never get caught!

Some criminals never get caught. There was a movie starring Leonardo diCaprio where he played a thief, I think, and the guy went on for years without getting caught. I can’t remember if he ever got caught in real life. I think he did, and nowadays he works as a security consultant or something like that… I’m not sure.

So let me give you an example: let’s say John just arrived at school after a great weekend at the beach and when he gets to the classroom, all his classmates are getting ready for an exam. They’re all sitting at their desks quietly, leafing through their books trying to quickly recap parts of the subject. John senses that something’s up and he asks Mary what’s going on. Mary looks at him, surprised, and says “We’re having an exam in five minutes”. Now, I have to say, this happened to me once when I was in college. I got to school and there was an exam going on which I knew nothing about, but that’s a story for another day. OK, so John forgot all about the exam, he didn’t prepare at all and now he thinks his only chance to do well is to leave the book open under his desk and try to look for the answers during the exam.

But John is not an experienced cheater. Up to now he has never cheated, so, guess what? His first attempt at cheating fails miserably. He’s looking at the first chapter of the book, trying to find the answer to question 1, and all of a sudden he sees his teacher standing right beside him. The teacher says “John, please hand me your exam and head straight to the Principal’s office”. So… John was caught red-handed. In Portuguese we could say “O John foi pego no flagra”. His teacher saw the book under John’s desk, and he saw John looking at the book. John was caught red-handed.

Other examples of being caught red-handed? Let’s say you left your wallet in a room, and left. After a while you come back and you open the door in the exact moment someone is taking money from your wallet. There’s no denying it – you saw it, you saw this guy holding your wallet in one hand and taking money from the wallet with the other had. You caught him red-handed.

Why do we say red-handed? It has to do with catching someone with blood in their hands, which might prove that this person committed a murder, or a crime. So John was cheating and he was caught red-handed, and that guy was taking money from your wallet and you caught him red-handed. And here’s another great way of saying that: John was caught in the act. He was caught in the act (ele foi pego no flagra). John was caught in the act, and you caught that guy in the act when he was trying to steal your money.