Hey everyone. Nesse episódio do podcast Inglês Online falo sobre expressões com a palavrinha own, incluindo uma das maneiras que os nativos do inglês usam para dizer “Agora assume!”.

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 focusing on the word own. O-w-n. When you own a car, the car belongs to you. It’s registered in your name; you can sell it if you want to. You probably bought it; you paid for it with your own money or maybe a relative… your father gave you the car. But it’s in your name now; you own it. Same thing with a house: you’re a home owner when the place where you live, be it a house or an apartment, belongs to you. If you look at all the documentation regarding the house, your name is up there in the field that says OWNER. You own the house; you’re a home owner. This is a very common term: home owner. In Portuguese I guess we’d say something like “Eu sou proprietário” or “Eu sou dono de alguma coisa”, depending on what we were talking about. Those are great translations for ‘I’m the owner’ and ‘I own something’. But we also say ‘Eu tenho isso, eu tenho aquilo’ a lot in Portuguese. Depending on what we’re referring to, saying that we own something is more common, and also more accurate, than ‘I have or I’ve got something’.

You could certainly say “I’ve got a house in the beach”, for example, when you’re chatting with someone informally. If for some reason, however, you’d like to convey that you’re the owner of that thing; that it belongs to you… If, for whatever reason, it’s relevant to you to communicate that you are the owner, than use “I own it”. Maybe you’re chatting about residential properties in your area and it makes sense to say that you own a house in the neighborhood. Maybe you’re chatting with a dog breeder and it makes sense to say “I own six poodles”. Maybe… you just wanna show off: “I own three chains of restaurants and there are twenty restaurants in each chain. So, in total I own sixty restaurants.”

It’s not so usual to say “I own a pen” or “He owns three erasers”. We use ‘own’ more often when the thing we own is considered somewhat valuable. And this is an insteresting way to use “own” – when someone does extremely well at an interview, for example, we can say he or she owned the interview. Let’s say Jerry had an interview this morning. He’s back now and you ask him “So how did the interview go?” Jerry says “I owned it. My answers were spot on, the interviewer loved me”. So Jerry owned that interview; he killed it (that’s another way of saying he did extremely well). Let’s say your friend Jane did really well in her math test. She says “I did so well; I owned that test”. “He or she owned that room” is very common as well, and that’s when someone is able to socialize well with people in a party, for example, and entertain them, and everyone thinks that person is great, everyone wants to be around them, and so on.

Now on to the expression in the title of this podcast! “You screwed up” – have you heard that one? Not great to hear, but it happens… When someone screws up, that means that they made one or more mistakes; they went the wrong way about something; the results of something they did were awful, they did it the wrong way… you get the picture.

Of course, when someone screws up, one of the common reactions is to be quiet, or to disappear,