Como falo em inglês: podre de rico

Hi, everyone!  Hoje eu falo sobre dois idioms muito comuns com a palavra rich.

Transcrição

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So let's focus on the word rich for a bit. Here's our first idiom: get-rich-quick. It's actually a phrase, right? Get rich quick. And it is very commonly used as an adjective - for example, a get-rich-quick scheme. Notice that when a phrase becomes an adjective, it gets hyphenated - check out the transcript and you'll see it.

So I'm sure you can imagine what a get-rich-quick scheme is. I used to get emails all the time - I mean, nowadays they all go straight to the junk folder... Mostly I still see these ads, depending on the website I'm looking at, that say... John makes a thousand dollars a week without leaving his home. Click here and you'll learn what to do in order to make the same amount of money from home.

That's a typical get-rich-quick scheme, where you basically don't have to do any work and you still make a ton of money. And the thing is, if there are people still placing ads like these that means they still get results - in other words, there are people clicking because they wanna know how to... get rich quick.

Look what I found on Twitter: one guy said "I've met so many kids over the past three months who think this whole music and art thing is a get-rich-quick scheme." So this guy has met young people who think that getting into music is a way to become rich and famous without putting a lot of effort into it.

I think that a lot of young people actually believe that to be true. They don't know about all the hours artists put in working, exercising and rehearsing; how early in the morning they have to be up and so on. I don't think making money with music is a get-rich-quick scheme at all. What do you think?

And here's another idiom, or rather, more of a collocation in English. A collocation is the way native speakers combine words together to express an idea. For example, in Brazil we say someone is "podre de rico" when they're very, very rich. Why do we use the word "podre"? I don't know, but that's what we use.

In English, on the other hand, one of the words we use in a similar expression is filthy. We say someone is filthy rich, which means they're very, very wealthy. By the way, the word filthy alone means disgustingly dirty, like very dirty. So there you go - there are things that only the filthy rich can afford, such as buying a Ferrari, or owning ten different mansions around the world.

Interestingly enough, the expression for someone who's very, very poor is dirt poor. Dirt is that thing that gets on your clothes when you've been working outside on your garden all day. It's like dust or mud. Some artists started out in life dirt poor and worked really hard to become filthy rich. Like I said, I don't think music is a get-rich-quick scheme...

So what do you think of our expressions today? Do you know people who were born dirt poor and then became filthy rich? Let me know in the comments and talk to you next time!

Key expressions

* get-rich-quick

* filthy rich

* dirt poor