Hi, all. How have you been?

Nesse episódio do podcast Inglês Online falamos sobre expressões muito comuns no inglês, que começam com That’s… 

Transcrição

Hi, everyone. How have you all been? Here’s 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.

So today I picked four expressions… more like four set phrases that start with That’s… All four of them start with “That’s…” They’re all very, very common in everyday conversation and if you’re used to watching TV shows or movies, you’ve definitely heard them before.

Here’s the first one: That’s it! What does that mean? I’m gonna use an example to illustrate the meaning of “That’s it!” Let’s say Jennifer is having dinner at a restaurant. She orders a pizza. When the pizza arrives, she takes one look at it and immediately spots a band-aid. Yes, someone’s band-aid ended up on Jennifer’s pizza. She calls the waiter and he takes the pizza away, and ten minutes later comes back with another pizza. By now Jennifer is really hungry, and she’s about to go for her first slice of pizza when she realizes that this is a pepperoni pizza! She didn’t order pepperoni. She hates pepperoni! She ordered the cheese and mushroom toppings on her pizza.

Jennifer returns her pizza once again. She’s starving now, and she’s not pleased at all that this restaurant screwed up her order twice! Finally the waiter brings her the pizza with cheese and mushrooms. Her mouth is salivating and she’s ready to dig in, when… The waiter sneezes all over the pizza. Jennifer stands up and says “That’s it! This place is awful, service is ridiculously bad! I’m never setting foot in this place ever again.

So when Jennifer said “That’s it!”, what did she mean? She meant that she had had enough. First, she found a band-aid on the pizza. Then, they messed up her order: they brought pepperoni instead of cheese and mushrooms. The last straw was when the waiter sneezed all over her pizza. That was the last straw! That’s when Jennifer decided that she wasn’t going to spend another second at that restaurant, even tough she was starving. That was the moment she said “That’s it! That is it!” Enough of this! I’ve had enough. I have to do something, I can’t stay in this restaurant another second! That’s it!

Do you recognize this phrase, “That’s it!”? It’s very common so you’re bound to hear it if you regularly watch TV shows and movies made by English-speaking countries, especially the US. Now, I just used this expression a few seconds ago: That’s the last straw! That means about the same as “That’s it”. I don’t know the origin of the expression; I’m not sure why there’s a straw in it… In Portuguese we say something about “gota d’agua”, right? We say “foi a gota d’água”. In English, people use the present tense a lot too: That’s the last straw! That’s it!

So what was the last straw, in Jennifer’s case? The sneeze, right? The band-aid… she was pretty annoyed, but didn’t leave the restaurant. The messed-up order, with the pepperoni pizza… again, she was annoyed but she didn’t leave. But when the waiter sneezed on her pizza… that was the last straw. She couldn’t take it anymore. She said “That’s it! That’s the last straw.” and left.

Alright! Let’s move on another expression. Actually, to a couple of expressions that are the English version of this episode’s title.