Welcome to English as a Second Language Podcast, number 98, Winter Weather.
This is English as a Second Language Podcast, episode 98.
I'm your host, Dr Jeff McQuillan from the Center for Educational Development in beautiful Los Angeles, California.
This podcast, we're going to talk about weather in the wintertime.
Let's get started.
I grew up in Minnesota, where the summers are hot and humid and the winters are bitterly cold.
Living in Los Angeles now, it's sometimes hard to describe to people how winter weather can be in chillier climates.
In LA, most of the year, the weather is sunny, clear, and warm.
In one of my favorite movies, LA Story, the weathercaster pre-recorded his weather forecasts because the weather was the same every day.
Well, that's an exaggeration, because even in LA it can sometimes be quite cool in the winter and some areas around the beaches can have dense fog and occasionally drizzling.
But that's nothing compared to Minnesota.
In winter, they get snow flurries and blizzards, when as much as three feet of snow can fall.
As a kid, I would build snowmen and make angels on the ground.
That part was fun.
But I also froze my buns off.
And, of course, one thing that Minnesota has a lot of in the wintertime is snow.
Sometimes we get so many inches of snow, we had to shovel and plow our way out of our houses.
The worst is when there is freezing rain and sleet and the roads are slippery.
Needless to say, there was a lot of fender benders on the road with this kind of weather.
Luckily Minnesota doesn't get any hurricanes, but other parts of the country are hard hit by those every year.
Well, I have to say that it's nice not to have to scrape ice off my windshield in the mornings.
But I do miss the white Christmases.
We're talking about winter weather in this podcast.
I begin by telling how I grew up in Minnesota, and Minnesota is a state in the northern part of the United States, northern and middle.
It has a border with Canada.
In Minnesota, I said the summers are hot and humid, and the winters are bitterly cold.
To be humid, H-U-M-I-D, humidity has to do with how much water is in the air.
So if it's humid, there's a lot of water in the air, and it can make hot weather feel even worse.
You do a lot of sweating when it's humid.
To be bitterly cold in the winter means to be extremely cold, to be very, very cold.
I said, I live in Los Angeles now and it's sometimes hard to tell or describe to people what the weather is like in chillier climates.
To be chillier means to be colder.
If you say, however, it's chilly in here, you mean it's cold, it's a little cold.
So, chillier here means more cold.
Climate is just describing the weather, the type of weather that you have in a particular area.
In LA, I describe the weather as sunny, clear, and warm.
Sunny, of course, means the sun is out all the time.
Clear means there are no clouds in the sky.
It's sunny and clear.
There are no clouds, just the sun.
One of my favorite movies is L.A.
Story and it's about a weathercaster, someone who works on the television who tells what the weather is going to be like.
This weathercaster falls in love, of course, with a beautiful woman.
And it's a very good movie about Los Angeles and the people who live here.
The weathercaster pre-records his weather forecasts.
To pre-record means you record in advance.
It's not live.
Normally, of course, television broadcasts the news, for example, is live.
It's the person is talking at the same time that you are watching it.
To pre-record is to record something before that.
And because the weather was always the same in Los Angeles.
The joke in the movie was that you could record the weather forecasts in advance, pre-record them, and not have to be in the studio.
A forecast is, of course, a prediction about what the weather is going to be like.
The weather forecast.
I said that even in LA it can be quite cool in the winter and the beaches can have dense fog and occasionally drizzling.
Cool you know already as being lower temperature.
Fog is when you have, it's basically like a cloud on the ground.
And it's water, lots of water in the air, so much so that you can't see.
A dense fog is the same as a thick fog, meaning it's very heavy.
It's very difficult to see more than a few feet.
That would be a dense, D-E-N-S-E, fog, F-O-G.
Drizzling, to drizzle, means it is raining, but it is raining very lightly.
So a light rain, not a lot of rain coming down, would be a drizzle as a noun or to drizzle as a verb.
Drizzle is spelled D-R-I-Z-Z-L-E.
In Minnesota, however, in the wintertime, we get snow flurries and blizzards.
A snow flurry is when the snow is falling, but there's also some wind.
And so it's a little difficult to see when you have snow flurries.
A flurry is F-L-U-R-R-Y.
And the plural, we normally use the plural in talking about the weather.
Flurries is F-L-U-R-R-I-E-S.
A blizzard, B-L-I-Z-Z-A-R-D, is when there is so much snow, so much snow that you can barely see in front of you.
So a lot of snow.
It's a snowstorm, really. with lots of wind and snow coming down.
I said that as a kid, I would build snowmen and make angels on the ground.
A snowman you probably know is when you take snow and you roll it up, usually into two or three big balls a big ball, a medium ball and a small ball and the small ball on top is the head of the snowman and you put things like a carrot to make the nose and something dark, maybe some stones or something that you would put in for the eyes and so forth.
And of course you put a hat on top of the snowman.
And we would make snowmen in Minnesota all the time.
Angels is something we would do as children when it was snowing and right after it would snow.
Often the children go outside and they lay down with their back against the ground and then they take their arms and their legs and they move them up and down.
And what happens is you get if you stand up.
What you see is something like an artistic angel A-N-G-E-L.
An angel, of course, is a spirit, if you will, from heaven or from above, and many times they're depicted or they are drawn in artist by artists, as having big arms and these big legs.
So we would make something that would look like a typical angel picture on the ground.
It was a lot of fun.
I also said that I froze my buns off.
To freeze your buns off.
Well, first of all, your buns.
B-U-N-S is an informal slang word for your bottom, your rear end, your butt.
B-U-T-T what you sit on.
Those are your buns.
A mother who's angry at their son or daughter might say get your buns over here, meaning get yourself over here.
The expression to freeze your buns off means that you're very cold, that you're extremely cold not just your buns, but your whole body.
Anyway, in Minnesota we had so much snow I said that we had to shovel and plow our way out of our houses.
To shovel, S-H-O-V-E-L, means, well, it's a noun and a verb.
A shovel is something that's a long stick, and at the bottom there is a piece of metal.
And you use a shovel to dig a hole.
But you can also use a snow shovel to move snow out of your way.
And that is a verb as well.
To shovel is to use a shovel.
A plow, again, this is a noun and a verb, P-L-O-W.
To plow usually is what happens when you have a big truck.
And in front of the truck, there's a big piece of metal.
And that metal pushes or moves the snow off to the side of the road so that people can drive on the road.
That truck is called a plow as a noun, but the verb is to plow.
That's what the plow truck or the plow does.
I said that the worst in Minnesota is when there is freezing rain and sleet.
Freezing rain is what it sounds like.
The rain comes down, but it doesn't freeze until it hits the ground.
So there's all this ice on the ground.
Sleet is a combination of rain, freezing rain, and snow.
Sleet is spelled S-L-E-E-T.
I said the roads are often slippery when there's a lot of sleet.
Slippery, of course, means that you can slip, that you can fall.
It's hard to stand up or it's hard for cars to stop because they slip on the ice.
Needless to say, I said meaning it's obvious.
Needless to say, obviously there are a lot of fender benders on the road.
A fender, F-E-N-D-E-R, is the front part of your car.
It's sometimes called close to the bumper, the very front of the car.
And if you hit another car, if you have a car accident, you're probably going to damage the fender.
And a small car accident is called a fender bender, B-E-N-D-E-R.
Two words, fender bender.
It means a small car accident, not a serious one.
I said, Minnesota doesn't get any hurricanes, and a hurricane is what they call in some places a typhoon.
A hurricane is a large storm and we unfortunately had a couple of big hurricanes here in the.
I said that some parts of the country are hard hit by hurricanes every year.
To be hard hit means that they are seriously affected, that they cause a lot of damage.
To be hard hit.
Finally, I said that I am glad I don't have to scrape ice off my windshield.
To scrape ice is when it's cold and particularly when there's freezing rain.
There is going to be ice on your car.
And the front part of your car, the window, the front window of your car that you look out of, is called the windshield.
All one word windshield.
And you, of course, have to take a piece of plastic or metal and you have to get rid of the ice.
And that would be to scrape, to remove something that is very strongly attached to the surface.
I said that I do miss the white Christmases, meaning the Christmas time December 25th, when you have snow outside.
The traditional, almost romantic version of Christmas is that it's a white Christmas.
And that's the kind of... popular image of Christmas.
Of course, in Los Angeles, we don't have any white Christmases.
Now let's listen to the story again, this time at a native rate of speech.
I grew up in Minnesota where the summers are hot and humid and the winters are bitterly cold.
Living in Los Angeles now, it's sometimes hard to describe to people how winter weather can be in chillier climates.
In LA, most of the year, the weather is sunny, clear, and warm.
In one of my favorite movies, LA Story, the weathercaster pre-recorded his weather forecast because the weather was the same every day.
Well, that's an exaggeration, because even in LA it can sometimes be quite cool in the winter and some areas around the beaches can have dense fog and occasionally drizzling.
But that's nothing compared to Minnesota.
In winter, they get snow flurries and blizzards, when as much as three feet of snow can fall.
As a kid, I would build snowmen and make angels on the ground.
That part was fun. but I also froze my buns off.
And of course, one thing that Minnesota has a lot of in the wintertime is snow.
Sometimes we get so many inches of snow, we had to shovel and plow our way out of our houses.
The worst is when there is freezing rain and sleet and the roads are slippery.
Needless to say, there were a lot of fender benders on the road with this kind of weather.
Luckily Minnesota doesn't get any hurricanes, but other parts of the country are hard hit by those every year.
Well, I have to say that it's nice not to have to scrape ice off my windshield in the mornings, but I do miss the white Christmases.
From Los Angeles, California, I'm Jeff McQuillan.
Thanks for listening.
We'll see you next time on ESL Podcast.
English as a Second Language Podcast is written and produced by Dr Lucy Say, hosted by Dr Jeff McQuillan.
This podcast is copyright 2006.
