This is an All Ears English podcast, episode 2561, how to blow open your English vocabulary.
Welcome to the All Ears English podcast downloaded more than 200 million times.
Are you feeling stuck with your English?
We'll show you how to become fearless and fluent by focusing on connection, not perfection, with your American host, Aubrey Carter, the IELTS whiz, and Lindsay McMahon, the English adventurer coming to you from Arizona and Colorado, USA.
To get real-time transcripts right on your phone and create your personalized vocabulary list, try the All Ears English app for iOS and Android.
Start your seven-day free trial at allearsenglish.com forward slash app.
In this third part of our three-part series, we give three more ways to use blow as a phrasal verb.
Listen in for interesting vocabulary today.
Picture this.
You're part of the conversation.
Someone jumps in with a fast comment.
Everyone reacts, but you're left behind, still processing the words.
It's not that you don't understand English.
It's that real conversations don't slow down for you.
Slang, speed, tone, it all stacks up fast.
The good news, these are trainable skills if you know your English level and what to do to move up.
Start by taking our free two-minute fluency quiz to find out exactly what your level is now.
Go to allearsenglish.com slash fluency score.
That's allearsenglish.com slash F-L-U-E-N-C-Y-S-C-O-R-E.
Hey, Lindsay, how are you?
Doing great, Aubrey.
How's it going?
Excellent.
Have you gotten much snow in Denver yet?
Not too much.
I think we've had one small storm, but still waiting for the bulk of it.
Do they get a lot of snow days there?
Kind of, but they actually don't plow the streets here, which is really weird to me.
They just let the snow sit.
Like you just drive on it.
They just expect you to be able to drive in the snow.
Whereas in New England, they always plow the streets.
Yeah, it's different.
They're in Colorado.
Most people have four-wheel drive vehicles.
Yeah, it's true.
It's weird.
Aubrey, when you were a kid, did you ever get snow days up in Idaho?
Yes, we would get up really early if there had been a blizzard during the night.
And there would be huge drifts of snow out on the street.
So we knew the buses couldn't come through.
And so we would listen to the radio and they would announce the school districts that had closed.
And ours was always the last to call it.
We'd hear all and then finally, District 251 finally would close.
It's so funny.
I remember the number of my district for that exact reason.
I'm listening to the radio.
SAU 29.
I remember it.
So like sitting there and like holding my breath.
Are they going to say SAU 29?
Fingers crossed.
Well, this is fun.
We are going to talk about blizzards just a bit today because we are doing the third installment of a three-part series with phrasal verbs with the word blow.
And yeah, I'm excited for all of these.
You can listen to these out of order.
So if you miss the other two, stay to the end.
We'll share how you can find those.
Listen to this one first.
Who knew that this word was so much all over the English language?
It's incredible, right?
It's true.
So we're tackling it here today.
So where should we start today, Aubrey?
So each of these has multiple meanings.
We're going to start with blow open.
And some of these are also not like a phrasal verb.
They don't have this figurative meaning, right?
So blow open, just a verb with a preposition means being opened by a strong wind, right?
Like a sudden gust of wind blew the front door open.
Or the storm was so strong that it blew the windows open during the night.
Aubrey, have you ever lived or stayed in a place that has tornadoes like Oklahoma, Nebraska?
No, never.
Have you?
Okay.
Not really.
No, no.
I was wondering what that would be like though.
Scary.
No, the sirens, the tornado sirens.
I'll see videos, you know, I'm like, oh, that sounds horrifying.
Terrifying for sure.
So blow open as a physical wind is, you know, Releasing something.
Right.
Exactly.
Right.
But blow open also means exposing something that was previously hidden.
Like the investigation blew open, the corruption scheme.
Yes.
Yeah, this can happen a lot.
Like I remember back in 2008 when I was living in New York, there was the crash.
And then right after that, the Bernie Madoff thing was was blown open.
Right.
His scheme was blown open because of the crash.
There are all these.
You know this domino effect of all these things that happened because of the stock market crash.
Right.
We'll often hear this on a true crime podcast that, like a witness testimony or a whistleblower, will blow open a case.
Meaning like everything that was hidden is come to light.
Or sometimes podcasters will do this.
There's a lot of true crime podcasters.
And occasionally you'll hear in the news that because of a true crime podcast, a case was a cold case was blown open.
I love when that happens.
They're investigative reporting, like discovered everything that was hidden.
I know.
It's pretty cool.
Yeah, for sure.
What else, Aubrey?
Anything else?
We often add wide to add emphasis to this.
We'll say it was blown wide open, right?
So the witness testimony blew the case wide open.
And so it really has the same meaning.
We just sort of add that to emphasize.
Love it.
Okay.
So that's blow open really three or two and a half meanings there and then blow past.
So what does this mean?
So to move quickly past something or someone.
So, for example, she blew past all the other runners to take the lead.
Right.
So just to move quickly past someone will say you blow past them.
Yeah.
Or during the meeting, she blew past the small details and focused on the main issue.
Yeah.
Anytime you're just rushing past something or or some people, for example, either physically or in terms of achievement.
Right.
Like her grades.
She blew past her brother in terms of grades.
Yeah.
It doesn't have to be physical in any way.
Like if you move past someone quickly in some way, we can say you blew past them.
And then anything else of how we might use this?
I mean, yeah, we also use it to mean ignoring someone and continuing.
So, for example, the teacher blew past the interruptions and continued the lesson.
Right.
Or she blew past my comment and kept talking about her own project.
Sometimes, you see, I don't know like the paparazzi people have to blow past the paparazzi and cover their head right.
When the news is just surrounding them.
And teachers often have to do this.
If someone's interrupting in the class, you just have to blow past it and keep teaching.
Don't let it disrupt.
So much respect for classroom teachers.
There's a third.
It's blow in.
Now, what does this mean?
Yeah.
So it can just mean brought in by the wind, right?
Leaves blew in through the open window.
Or this is where blizzards are going to come up.
We would say a blizzard blew in last night.
And so that means like maybe there was not even snow on the ground.
And then you wake up in the morning and see that a blizzard had blown in.
And it's interesting, these two different examples are like sub meanings of blow in.
So with the leaves blew in, they're physically entering the home, but the blizzard is not entering the home in the second example.
The wind is still moving it in, but it's not blowing it inside somewhere, right?
Exactly.
So that's important to kind of know that little nuance difference.
And then a totally different meeting.
Someone shows up unexpectedly in kind of a casual and careless way, maybe.
Right.
Unannounced when maybe they should be.
I feel like you could say they blew in.
A little bit of recklessness there or just not caring.
Right.
My cousin just blew in from New York without warning.
Yes.
And this I feel like we would most likely say if they showed up expectantly.
York and now they're staying for two weeks.
That's not good.
We did an episode this fall about Fish and Company.
Guys, look up that episode.
It was a great one.
Yes, right.
Three days max, guys.
Yes, really good.
And then I think we asked our students in Open Conversation Club something about that culturally.
I think we did at least.
Yes, we did.
That was really interesting.
And it did seem like Three days was.
But in different languages there are these different expressions.
And so I would love for you guys to comment on YouTube.
Go find that episode.
I think it would be interesting to learn all of the kind of related but different phrases for this in other languages.
Really interesting.
And then Aubrey, how would a CEO blow in?
What would that mean?
You could say, I can't believe the CEO blew in right before the meeting.
No one expected that.
So it just means to arrive unannounced.
Nice.
Perfect.
Okay, let's do a role play.
Aubrey, we know our listeners love these little role plays where we show them how we bring this to life.
We are cousins meeting up for lunch.
Cool.
All right.
Want to start us off?
Sure.
Sure.
Okay.
All right.
So how, oops, find where I was.
Okay.
Hey, how was, I went to find a number.
Yes, I'm good.
Here we go.
Did you see that guy blow past us in line and order?
That was so rude.
I think he didn't see us standing there.
I almost said something and then thought better of it.
I guess that makes sense.
He was looking at his phone, so he probably didn't even notice us there.
Hey, did you hear Aunt Virginia is in town?
No.
Is she staying with you?
Yeah, I didn't know she was coming.
She just blew in Tuesday night without notice.
That might blow up our plans for your dad's surprise birthday party.
She's not very good at keeping secrets.
Feels like a realistic conversation, right?
Absolutely, right?
That is interesting with phrasal verbs when they have such different meanings.
You might use a few in one conversation.
Yeah, legitimately for sure.
So you started by saying did you see that guy blow past us in line in order?
That was so rude.
So again, it had blowing past as an air and in like an air of what like, Like he ignored us.
He just went right past us.
Not paying attention, not caring.
And this happens a lot, I think, now that people are on their phones more and more.
Oh, yeah.
You don't see people in line waiting.
You just blow past them and are rude with it.
Unless someone says something, you might do that without even realizing it.
Yeah, we got to be careful for sure, because people have feelings still, even though we have technology right.
Right.
And a sense of fairness, right?
People still have that deeply held value of fairness.
Yeah.
And then you said, yeah, I didn't know she was coming.
She just blew in Tuesday night without notice.
So she showed up unexpectedly.
Exactly.
And then I said oh, or you said that might blow open our plans for your dad's surprise birthday birthday party.
So we have this secret and it might get blown open.
And when you read it, it almost sounded like blow up.
You could also say blow up here.
That might blow up our plans, meaning ruin them.
I think it may be in my head.
I was saying that or something.
I don't know.
That would work here as well.
It kind of depends on exactly what you're saying.
Yeah, so the slight difference there would be to blow up would be ruin, like you said.
Blow up would be like ruin, and blow open would be she would give away the secret.
Expose the secret.
Aubrey, what are the other two?
This is the last episode in this series, but what are the other two episodes so our listeners can catch up?
If you missed them, part one was 2552, how to master confusing past tense verbs in English.
And then part two was...
2556.
You could scroll up if you missed that.
Don't blow off phrasal verbs.
Nice.
I love that after this series, our listeners are going to be really ready to just take this, all this, very natural.
You know these verbs, these phrasal verbs, out into the world.
So good for so many different situations, too, don't you think?
Absolutely.
Right.
Each of these has so many meanings.
You will be well prepared to have informal conversations about a lot of different things.
Yeah because again, what phrasal verbs do is?
They bring us to connection?
Because they are informal right.
Exactly.
So good.
All right.
Good stuff today, Aubrey.
We'll see you back here very soon.
You have a good rest of your day.
You too.
See you next time.
All right.
Bye.
Thanks for listening to All Ears English.
Would you like to know your English level?
Take our two minute quiz.
Go to allearsenglish.com forward slash fluency score.
And if you believe in connection, not perfection, then hit subscribe now to make sure you don't miss anything.
See you next time.
