O podcast de hoje fala sobre a expressão look up e vários de seus significados.

Transcrição

Hi, what’s up? 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

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Today I’m gonna talk about the expression “look up”. “Look up” can mean different things depending on how it’s used, so here is a very popular way to use it: let’s say I’m reading a magazine and all of a sudden I stumble upon the word “maze”. Maze, m-a-z-e. I have no idea what maze means, and I can’t understand what I’m reading. So what am I gonna do now? I am going to look up this word in a dictionary.

So that means that I’m going to grab my dictionary, which is a collection of words and information about these words, right? And then I’m going to find the section that lists all the words beginning with the letter M, and then I’m going to find “maze” and learn about its meaning. I’m going to look up “maze” in a dictionary. By the way, maze is something like a labyrinth.

What’s the last word you looked up in a dictionary? For me, it was “persimmon”. I didn’t look it up in a print dictionary, though. You know? The physical book. I don’t use print dictionaries anymore. I looked up persimmon on a dictionary website, one which I highly recommend. Here it goes: thefreedictionary.com. So I looked up “persimmon” on their website. By the way, if you don’t know what persimmon means, look it up on Google Images. You’ll see pictures of persimmons and you’ll know immediately what it means.

In general, when you have something like a collection of information on many topics, and you want to consult that resource to find information on one particular item, you can say “look up”. I’m gonna look up persimmon in a dictionary. Then, I’m going to look it up on Google Images and see what a persimmon looks like.

How about Wikipedia? Wikipedia is like an encyclopedia, but its articles are written by… just about anyone, so the information on that website is not always accurate, but it’s still useful most of the time. So Wikipedia is a collection of articles about many, many different topics. I look something up on the Wikipedia website almost every day. And here’s one more perfect example: the phone book, the directory of residents and their address and telephone number for a particular city. The last time I looked someone up in the phone book was… a while ago. It’s been a while! Actually, last weekend I looked up the phone number for a restaurant in the Yellow Pages. I looked up a phone number in the Yellow Pages. And the number was there.. I found it.

So here’s another meaning for “look up”: who do you respect and admire? Think of someone in your family, or a friend. Someone who you always listen to. When that person is speaking, you pay attention. Is it your father, your mother, a brother, a sister, an uncle, a friend? Who do you really admire and respect? Who do you look up to? For example, my sister looks up to my father. She respects and admires him very much. You know teen idols? Teenage actors, or young tv hosts, whose public is children? Remember, in Brazil we had Xuxa, Angélica. Many times children look up to them. In movies we often hear someone say “He looks up to you”. “He” is usually a little boy, and the boy’s mother is saying to the boy’s father, for example… “He looks up to you”

So who do you look up to? Maybe there’s a grandfather you look up to. Maybe there’s an old friend you look up to. When you’re in need of some advice,