Hello, everyone. No episódio de hoje, eu falo sobre duas expressões muito bacanas e bastante usadas do inglês.

Transcrição

Hi, all. How are you guys? Today we have a new episode of the Inglesonline podcast. Please subscribe to this podcast using the Podcasts app for iPhone or iPad, or listen to the episodes using the Inglesonline Android app. To download or just listen to other episodes and download transcripts, go to inglesonline.com.br and click Podcast Inglesonline.

So I was listening to a podcast this morning and this sentence came up: “Star Wars is such a ubiquitous, cross-generational thing”. What? OK, let’s break this down. For those of you who don’t know, Star Wars is the more general name of the sci-fi trilogy from the late 70’s that tells the story of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and Han Solo, among other characters. It’s made history; it’s pretty famous and well-known and more recently another Star Wars trilogy was made that was supposed to be the prequel – which means, it’s about what happened before the original trilogy.

OK, now that you’re all caught up – listen to that sentence from the podcast again: “Star Wars is such a ubiquitous, cross-generational thing”. Here’s the word I’d like to focus on right now: ubiquitous. What does that mean? Well, it’s related to what I just said a minute ago: that Star Wars is pretty well-known… all over the world, really. The podcaster was saying that Star Wars is ubiquitous. If something, or someone is ubiquitous, that means they’re everywhere, or that everyone talks about them, or maybe everyone is aware of  them. That thing is ubiquitous in conversations, or in people’s minds or maybe on television. I feel like some actors become ubiquitous and everywhere you turn there’s a movie with them in it. That was my impression about this actress Rachel McAdams a while ago. It seemed like she was in all the new releases. She was ubiquitous!

Listen to this word again: ubiquitous. Now, it may sound like a super sophisticated word, but… it is relatively common in conversation. You probably won’t hear it from teenagers that speak really informal English full of slang and so on, but you will hear it from people who speak English just on a slightly higher level. I’m not even talking about professors or intellectuals; I’m talking about people with all sorts of backgrounds that speak fairly good English in everyday situations. Such as the podcast I was listening to.

Can you think of an actor or actress that seems to be ubiquitous on Brazilian TV? This person seems to be everywhere: they’re on a soapopera, commercials, a new movie that’s just been released. You fire up your Internet browser and there they are on some advertisement or a newspiece. Who’s the most ubiquitous celebrity in Brazil today? I wanna know what you think: please leave your answer in a comment.

And the second term used by the podcaster is quite interesting as well: cross-generational. “Star Wars is such a ubiquitous, cross-generational thing”. When something is cross-generational, it involves multiple generations. Maybe it’s popular with people from different generations, like people in their 20’s, 30’s, 40’s and so on. Maybe all these people want to participate in that thing, they like it, they know about it, and that’s what makes it cross-generational. Maybe it affects different generations equally. A cross-generational thing makes its way across multiple generations, it affects them in some way. So Star Wars, in the words of the podcaster, is such a ubiquitous, cross-generational thing.

And I agree with that. I like Star Wars,