This is an All Ears English podcast episode 2583.
Are you the sandwich?
Why native speakers say this?
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Hey, Aubrey, what's shaking?
What's going on?
Not too much.
How are you, Lindsay?
Good.
But I had a little bit of a curiosity in my head today.
Okay.
Can I ask you a question?
Yes.
All right.
So have you ever heard anyone say the phrase, I'm the sandwich?
I've heard that lately and I just don't even know what it means.
Okay.
So I just said this like two days ago, and then I remembered this episode because I was at lunch and the server brought a salad and a sandwich and I said I'm the sandwich.
Oh, that's so funny that we say I'm the sandwich.
Oh, I got it now.
I got it.
I ordered the sandwich.
Okay.
Okay.
Because I when I first I was like, what?
No, we have this title.
Lizzie was like, what is this about?
I'm confused.
It's such a funny and I'm excited to go in.
This actually was inspired by a misunderstanding in a recent roleplay.
Lindsay, you were like reading the role play and you said, I know I'm a bit out of the way.
And you sort of got confused because you didn't realize you were referring to your house.
You're supposed to be referring to your house.
This is good.
It is so interesting.
It's very common in natural English, especially in spoken informal conversations, that we say I or me, but that stands for something else.
So that's the point of today's episode.
I'm excited to get into this.
Native speakers use I or me to stand for things like their house, what they ordered at the restaurant, their office.
And I guess any pronoun, because I could say he's the sandwich and point out my husband if he's the one that ordered the sandwich, right?
Right, right, right, right.
Or I think about.
I feel like oftentimes, if you're on a bus with someone and you arrive at your bus stop, they say something like oh, this is us.
Right.
This is me.
This is me.
Oh, this is me where I would get off that bus stop.
But you do need to get off of that bus stop.
So this is what we're getting into, guys.
This is a great theme today.
This is all about connection because these moments really do matter, right?
So go ahead and hit that follow button if you love our style of connection, not perfection.
Or remember today's episode is also on video over on YouTube.
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Go ahead and hit subscribe on the YouTube channel, okay?
Yes.
Awesome.
So let's dive into this.
This is really fun.
Maybe you guys have noticed this before.
Maybe not, but you'll definitely hear it now.
It's extremely common.
Native speakers do it without even realizing they're doing it.
Right.
And I also wonder if this is done in other languages or not.
And if we translated it, how that would work, right?
So I could see if it was done in other languages and we didn't do it in English and we directly translated, that would be a problem.
Right.
Totally.
In fact, come back to YouTube, leave a comment and let us know.
Do you also do this in your first language where I would be so curious to know?
Yeah, it's true because I don't actually know in Spanish if we do.
Yeah, even though we both speak some Spanish.
I'm going to have to ask some of my Spanish-speaking friends.
I'm not sure either.
Yeah, for sure.
Okay, let's get into the nitty-gritty here.
So the first way we do it is referring to a place, and that's home, office, or location.
Tell us about this.
Exactly.
So for example, someone might say, I'm a bit far.
And they might be standing right next to you.
That doesn't make sense.
You're close to me, right?
But what they mean in the context of the conversation.
They might mean my place is far, my home is far, my office is far, whatever you're talking about.
They're saying, I'm far, I'm a bit far, referring to that place.
Yeah, this is so important to know.
And of course, it's only going to come up in the context of the conversation.
Someone's not just going to walk up to you at the tea room and say, I'm a bit far.
No, it would make no sense.
Right.
But you're talking about your new home, maybe that you just bought.
And that's in context.
Yeah.
Maybe you leave a kid's basketball game and they're like, let's hang out.
Should we go to your place or our place?
And you say, I'm a bit far.
It means my house is a bit far from here.
Yes, exactly.
Or you could say, I'm right off the highway.
So again, you're not right off the highway, right?
Your house is right off the highway.
You're trying to emphasize it's pretty close, right?
Exactly.
Or if someone's just like, you know, where do you live?
Where are you located?
Right?
Oh, I'm right off the highway.
I'm right next to the lake.
Yeah, standing right next to them.
That makes no sense that they would know you mean your house.
They've asked where your house is.
But yeah, we use the pronoun I'm I'm right off the highway.
Exactly.
Or I'm hard to find.
If you said this to someone out of nowhere, and they were just lost.
Yeah.
So you're not saying I'm hard to find.
You're saying my place, my home.
It's hard to find.
So imagine you're at your house giving someone directions.
They're like driving around.
They can't find your driveway and they call you and be like, yeah, sorry, I'm hard to find.
You're going to turn right after the big oak tree, right?
We wouldn't say necessarily my house is hard to find.
They know it's implied.
It's understood.
They know you're talking about your house.
You'd say I'm hard to find.
Yeah, so good.
And then this is me.
So this is me.
This is us.
Right.
So you've listeners have probably heard this in movies.
Maybe two people are out on a date or something and the guy's walking the girl home, whatever.
And she stops at like a brownstone in Brooklyn.
Oh, this is me.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
Right.
And just word for word, it's actually very idiomatic.
That doesn't make any sense.
What it means is this is where we need to stop so that I can go into my house.
Right.
This is where my house is.
Oh, this is so good.
I'm surprised we haven't covered this yet on the show through twenty five hundred episodes.
We're finally getting to it.
But it was high time.
It's so fun.
It was really fun to plan.
And I love this.
It's so true.
Like you were mentioning this one, Lindsay.
If you are in a taxi or on a bus, we would be much more likely to say this is me, this is us, before we get off that, rather than saying like this is where I live or whatever else you would say.
Because when a subject is implied, when something is implied, it's redundant to say it.
It almost implies a lack of intelligence in the other person.
So like we're saying this because it's already understood.
And now we want to personalize it, right?
Because it's about the connection between you and the other person.
So now it's you are your house, you are your chicken sandwich, right?
So that's moving on to the other context.
There's more places.
It's not just about your home, your location.
It could be about what, Aubrey?
Yeah.
So for example, that example in the beginning, right?
To mean that's my order.
That's what I ordered.
The server says who's and the server might even say, who's the chicken sandwich?
Like who is the chicken sandwich that they're holding?
And you say me, I'm the chicken sandwich.
That's so funny.
Or I'm table six, right?
So now this, who would this be said by?
I have a feeling this would be the waiter.
It means I'm sitting at table six, right?
So maybe you've reserved like at a wedding.
I could definitely imagine someone's like, which table are you sitting at?
Oh, I'm table six.
We're table six.
Got it.
Or maybe if the server, like most restaurants, you don't know, not a wedding, but a restaurant scenario.
You don't know the numbers of the tables, but the servers do.
Oh yeah, when they're talking to each other, right?
She's table six, they are table six.
The beginning of the night, they do the strategy talk, right?
And they say, oh, I'm table six tonight.
I'm table six through 12 tonight, right?
Or we might say like instead of knowing the table number if like, imagine you are sitting, you're waiting for a friend, you get up to go to the restroom or something, they come in and be like I'm the table by the window.
Oh, yeah.
Totally.
Or we, we're the table by the window.
Yeah, come meet us.
But they would know you mean, that's our table.
That's where you should go sit.
And you, of course, could put a simple preposition in there to make it a little more literal.
We're at the table by the window, right?
You could say that too.
It doesn't make it wrong, but we're teaching something different today.
We're teaching that you become the table.
Exactly.
It's fun.
It's so funny.
I think you would not be alone, Lindsay that, if I said to someone have you ever said I'm the sandwich?
They'd be like, no, what are you talking about?
And then if I gave them in that context, they'd be like, oh, I absolutely say that all the time.
I'm always a sandwich.
I always order sandwiches.
I love them.
I'm always the sandwich.
My husband is always the salad.
They often servers will give us the wrong one because I'm the burger and he's the salad and they'll assume I'm the salad.
That's hilarious.
I love breaking the stereotypes of what men eat and women eat.
I love it.
So good.
And then the last one is I'm cash only.
So what does this mean?
I'm cash only.
So this might be said by a cashier, meaning like I can only take cash transactions, right?
You go up to a register and then say I'm cash only, meaning like you can't use credit cards here.
Yeah, totally.
Or you go to a gas station and there's no more gas and you go and say, hey, my pump's not working.
I'm out of gas.
Right.
So the guy at the guy or girl at the register might say, I'm sorry, I'm out of gas.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
And we say that we say that like when our car's out, I'm out of gas.
You know, we don't say my car is out of gas.
Usually I'm out of gas.
So it could be multiple people in different positions who are taking on this like personification.
Right.
Super interesting.
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All right.
So why the heck do we do this?
Aubrey, we touched on this a little bit.
I think we could go into it a bit more.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
So spoken English often prioritizes efficiency, first of all.
So shorter, faster speech, removing the subject using a pronoun instead.
Even if it's not really me, it's understood what the subject is.
So I can say I or me.
Yep.
We also emphasize shared context, which builds connection, right?
So listeners can infer the meaning of what you mean, right?
Like you're coming into a restaurant, like the example you gave earlier, where you're texting someone to join you at a restaurant and you're already there with friends.
We're the table in the back.
Not we're at the table in the back, which would be fine too.
But for today, we're the table in the back.
It's just, it feels a little more warm.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah, it's interesting.
And this way the listener, like you were saying, infers the meaning.
It does remove some of the sort of formality, the extra words, that wall because we are, and it also.
The third reason is it's speaker centered framing.
So we are putting ourselves we do this in conversations that we make ourselves the center, even if it doesn't make sense grammatically, really.
Yes.
And it's super interesting that if you study different languages, not all languages kind of put themselves at the center of a sentence.
Put the speaker at the center of a sentence.
Right.
So that's cultural, too.
Wow.
Love this.
This is blowing my mind today.
Yeah, it's really interesting.
And then you know we want to briefly touch on when not to use it or when it's a little less appropriate like very formal writing, especially like contracts, academic essays, then you would maybe want to avoid this.
But even casual conversations at work or in meetings at work, we still do this, right?
If maybe your pen is like, oh, I'm the black pen.
Yeah.
Instead of like that black pen is mine.
I love that.
Or again... situations where clarity is critical.
Any kind of safety instructions, right?
Legal, technical instructions where you just don't want anything to get misinterpreted, where it's being written down or you're delivering them.
But you just have to be clear.
We want to stay away from this.
This is for connection moments, being warmer, putting yourself at the center.
Spoken English, conversational English.
Absolutely.
Really good.
Okay.
Let's do a role play.
This will be fun.
So we are meeting our new friend.
I'm meeting my new friend, Aubrey.
That's you for lunch.
Cool.
We just met here.
You want to start us out?
Yes.
Hey, you live in Phoenix, right?
How far are you from downtown?
Yeah, I'm right off I-10.
Wait, are you in that building on Washington?
Yep, that's me.
It's nice that it has such easy access to the freeway.
Oh, here's the server.
I'm the Cobb salad.
And the French dip is me.
A salad and a dip.
It is funny if you take it out of context.
You're like, what?
You're the French dip.
So here I asked you, oh, you live in Phoenix.
How far are you from downtown?
So immediately we're going to location.
So it's an opportunity to use this.
Yeah.
And out of context, you would think that you're asking me where I am and how far I am from downtown.
But in context it's clear to both of us that you're asking how far my home is from downtown, how far I live is from downtown.
And then I say, I'm right off I-10.
Clearly, I don't mean me.
I'm sitting right next to you.
What that means is I live right off I-10.
Yeah.
Clearly, I don't need to know how far you are from downtown in this moment.
We're in a restaurant together.
Right.
Exactly.
And then I said, wait, are you in that building on Washington?
Right.
So we're talking about a particular building maybe that I see often.
Right.
Yes, exactly.
Clearly, I'm not in that building right now.
So what you mean is, do I live in this building on Washington?
Right.
And you said, yep, that's me.
And you are not the building, but you are saying, yes, I live in that building.
Exactly.
Right.
It's really interesting, with all of these, to look at what's being left out, how much more informal, how much more friendly the wall of formality is down.
Like I'm not saying, you know, you're not saying how far is your house from downtown?
And I'm not saying I live right off I-10.
We're removing all of that.
I mean, we're going to get into that in the takeaway.
That's the cue where there is a connection moment here, because when you move it's kind of like changing your register a little bit right.
Yeah, it's very subtle.
It's very subtle, but people notice it, right?
That wall of formality you can feel when it's down.
Interesting.
And then we have the most common example is the server comes over with two dishes, right?
Mm-hmm.
Or I'm the sandwich.
The sandwich is me.
And the server might even say, who's the sandwich?
Who's the salad?
Yeah, you're going to see this coming at you.
So be ready for it, right?
Guys, another great episode is 2543.
Go out of your way for these English direction phrases.
And is that where this episode came from, Aubrey?
Yes, that role play.
The role play.
If you go back and listen to that one, it's actually a really fun moment where you're like reading the role play and you kind of get so.
You're like hesitating because you don't realize you're supposed to be referring to your house and not yourself.
It's really great.
That's why we have to be very present in our conversations, right?
100%.
Yeah.
Aubrey, what's our takeaway?
Yeah, I love what you're saying, right?
This.
It's sort of subtle, but whoever you're talking to will feel it.
When you do this, when you remove the subject, when you are more conversational, you're more informal.
It does feel that you feel that connection.
Yeah.
And don't get us wrong, guys.
It doesn't mean you need to be best friends with the person to use this type of language.
It just means hey, I'm going to relax a little bit around you and get a little bit more familiar and a little bit more connected.
Right.
Exactly.
Right.
A little less formal, a little less.
It really does have this subtle implication that you care about the connection.
You feel comfortable with them.
You like them.
It's amazing how this very subtle language feature does all of that.
Super interesting.
Good stuff today, Aubrey.
And we'll be back soon for another connection episode.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Yeah.
We'll see you guys next time.
All right.
Take care.
Bye.
Bye.
See you next time.
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