Podcast: Highly unusual

What's up?  Hoje eu falo sobre combinações perfeitas entre advérbios e adjetivos, usadas pelos nativos todos os dias.

Confira!

Transcrição

What's up? You're listening to the new episode of the Inglês Online podcast, and today I'm talking about adverbs that go really well with adjectives, also known as adverb-adjective collocations.

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So today I'm talking about adverb-adjective collocations... ugh. Kidding, it's not boring, really, 'cause it's not a grammar lesson. I only mentioned "adverb-adjective" so you have a reference for what the general topic is for this episode. Let's get right into it with the first example: instead of saying someone was aware of something, you can say that person was fully aware of what was going on. Let's say we're talking about a guy named Jack here.

So Jack wasn't just aware. Jack was fully aware of, let's say, the sales meeting that happened this morning. It's not like he just heard something about the meeting in passing. No, he had all the details. He got an in invitation to the meeting, and RSVP'ed yes. Jack was fully aware of the sales meeting this morning.

Fully aware is used instead of just "aware" when, obviously, you want to emphasise that someone knew full well that something was going to happen and so on. It's a handy expression when people are trying to avoid taking responsibility for something or when they want to pretend they had no idea something was going on. In those cases you say "Nope, you were fully aware this was going on."

And that's why "fully aware" is a collocation. That's how people speak. That's the combination of words native speakers use. They don't say, for example, "You are wholly aware" or "entirely aware". Are these wrong? Nope. People will get it, they just don't use them - at least not often.

Here's another one: if you think Inglês Online is going anywhere, you are sadly mistaken. That means, you are completely mistaken. You think English is impossible to learn? You're sadly mistaken. It's just that you haven't been trying to learn it the right way. If you think we don't have sunny days in London you're sadly mistaken. We have plenty of sunny days out here.

And how about when someone's really shy? We can say he or she is painfully shy. Tony can't speak to a room full of people. He gets very uncomfortable at a party - he's painfully shy. I found this example on Twitter - a girl wrote "I hate how sometimes I am incredibly outgoing then sometimes I am painfully shy". Can you relate?

Let me talk about the word 'unusual' now. I like this word. Instead of saying that something is strange, you can just say it's unusual. That means it's something that doesn't happen very often, it's unexpected and so on. You can emphasise that, saying something is highly unusual. You hear this often in movies and TV shows when someone's sort of apologising or trying to explain why something didn't go as planned. They might say "Everything seemed to be under control and then, all of a sudden, the engine exploded. That is highly unusual." You know what else is highly unusual? How hot it is today here in London. The windows are open and I'm sweating, people.

So here's the last one to wrap up this episode: a nice way to say that something costs an arm and a leg. Here's my example: sometimes I go to the supermar...