Hello and welcome to bonus episode number 160 of the Q-Lips English podcast.
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Thank you for clicking play and joining me for this English study session.
In our bonus episode series.
What I do is I tell you some stories from my everyday life, and I hope that by listening to them, you will be able to build your English fluency.
Today I've got a funny story about a funky jacket.
A funny story about a funky jacket that i think you will enjoy.
I'll get to that story in just a moment, but before i do i want to remind you that there's a free interactive transcript and vocabulary glossary available for this episode to everyone.
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And with that being said, let's jump into today's episode about my funky jacket.
Kind of a funny story, this one, and I hope you guys will enjoy it.
So let's get right to it.
Here we go.
All right, guys.
So in this week's story, I'm going to tell you the tale of a funky jacket.
A funky jacket and how I fixed my funky jacket problem.
Okay, so first of all, I should mention that this word funky, this adjective funky, actually has two different meanings in English.
And it's very important to distinguish the two meanings, because They are both very common but they have totally different meanings.
And especially when I say a funky jacket.
Actually just that unique isolated phrase makes it impossible to tell what I'm talking about.
It could be either one of the meanings of funky.
So the first meaning of funky, probably the more common one, is used to describe something that's very colorful or bright or fantastic.
So if I say a funky jacket, then what probably pops into my mind first is like a very bright, colorful jacket.
Maybe I think of like the 1990s style, with all of those bright colors, those like neon colors that were popular back in the 90s.
I think of that, okay?
A funky jacket meaning bright colorful loud vibrant, bright all of those kind of images pop into my mind.
But the second meaning and also very common.
I don't want to say that this is an uncommon meaning, because we use it this way often as well.
We talk about funky meaning, something that smells really bad.
So a funky jacket could also mean a jacket that smells really bad.
And that's what I'm going to talk to you today about.
I'm not going to talk to you about wearing a cool, bright, colorful jacket.
Instead, I'm going to tell you about my bad-smelling, unpleasant-smelling jacket, my funky jacket.
So let me start at the beginning by saying that this story happened over a year ago, And I actually recorded a bonus episode about it back in the day when this story first happened.
But I had an audio issue when I recorded that story.
And so I didn't want to release the episode at the end of the day because I wasn't happy with the way that it sounded and i meant to re-record it and i totally forgot.
And then just this week i took out my clothes for the fall here.
We've had a long hot summer and we're well into october now here in seoul, but just finally it's kind of kind of slowly transitioning into fall weather and jacket weather.
And even during the daytime, I don't need a jacket when I go outside.
But in the evening, it's getting a little bit chilly and I need to wear a jacket.
And I put on my funky jacket, my ex-funky jacket, I should say.
And that reminded me of this story.
And so I'm going to finally tell it here about one year after it actually happened.
So let me start at the start.
Well, every year I have this ritual.
I guess it's a twice yearly ritual of swapping my clothes my spring summer clothes and my fall winter clothes.
So I have very limited closet space in my tiny home.
And that means that I can't put all of my clothes in my closet and I have to put some in storage when I don't wear them.
So in the summer...
My winter coats and my long pants and my sweaters, these kinds of things, they are in storage.
And then the opposite is true.
In the winter I put all of my summer clothes in storage, just so I can free up enough space in my closet and have a place to store all of my clothes.
And when I say I put my clothes in storage, it just means I store them under my bed.
So I have this bed that is a little bit higher off the ground than a regular bed.
And underneath it are all of these storage compartments.
So I can lift up my mattress and there are these storage compartments where I can lift up the bottom of the bed and then store stuff under there.
And that's where I usually put my off season clothes.
And I also put them in a vacuum sealable bag.
So before storing my clothes, of course, I clean them, launder them, make sure they're all nice and clean and tidy.
And I fold them up nicely and neatly and then put them in the vacuum sealable bag.
And then I attach my vacuum hose to the plastic bag and I suck out all of the air and the bag shrinks down and then I'm able to fit it under my bed.
So that's what I do with my off-season clothes.
And I've done this for several years without any issues at all.
But last year I had a big issue when I took out my fall jackets.
Because I took them out of the vacuum sealed bag they had been sitting under my bed all summer long.
And I took them out and 99 of my clothes smelt okay, except for two pieces jackets that I have that are made by this company called Barber.
Barber is a British brand and they make these really nice jackets that are perfect for the fall.
They're not too warm.
They're not too cool.
They're just like this lovely fall jacket.
And the problem with these two jackets, once I got them out of the vacuum sealable bag in my storage compartment, is that they were funky.
They had this really strange smell.
It's almost impossible for me to describe the smell.
It was just weird, like not in a good way at all.
It's just like this weird, dark, funky smell.
Not quite rotten, but almost like moldy, I guess would be the best way that I could describe it.
Almost just like stale and bad.
Okay.
And at first, when I took them out, I thought hmm, I gave them a good sniff and I thought hmm, maybe people won't notice.
Like maybe it's just because the jacket is so close to my nose, right?
When I'm wearing it, that no one will notice.
But I put on the jacket and I walked by my wife.
And actually, my wife has a very sensitive nose.
So she would be the perfect person to be able to tell me if these jackets were too strong smelling or not to be able to wear.
So I put on the jacket and I just walked into the room where my wife was sitting.
And as soon as I walked into the room and she was several meters away from me, immediately she was like what is that smell?
What's going on?
And I realized, oh my gosh, these jackets have a serious problem.
So I don't know what caused the problem.
Like I said, I had done this in the past and I never had an issue.
So I wasn't sure what was going on exactly.
And the thing with these barber jackets guys, is that you can't just throw them in the washing machine and wash them.
They're a special kind of jacket.
They're called a waxed jacket.
So the fabric has this wax coating on it and that's to keep it waterproof.
And if you were to just throw it in the washing machine it would destroy that wax coating and destroy the jacket being waterproof.
And yeah, I've heard that you should never just throw your jacket in the washing machine.
And you also can't take it to the dry cleaners either.
So those would be my first usual go-to steps, right?
Is like wash it and try to get the smell out.
Or take it to the dry cleaners and try to get them to take the smell out for you.
But those two steps were unavailable to me just because of the special nature of this coat.
So I was pretty bummed out because I love these jackets.
My wife bought me one while we were dating.
She bought me a black barber jacket.
And then a little bit later on, I picked up another one because I loved it so much.
I just think that it looks really good on me.
I'm not really a fashion guy or into clothes or anything like that.
But when I wear these jackets, I feel more adult.
I feel more confident.
And my wife always says that I look handsome in it.
Whenever i'm in the fall and i wear that jacket, she always says oh, you look good in that jacket.
So it makes me feel confident when i wear the jacket and yeah, like i said, like a mature adult and And so I love the barber jacket.
I wanted to fix it.
I needed to get rid of the smell.
I couldn't walk around with this terrible smell.
If I were to maybe describe it better this way, it's try and think about of the smell, like a musty smell.
Musty is a word that we use, maybe to describe, think of like an old book from a used bookstore that's just been sitting on the shelf for like 50 years.
Super old book.
And then you open that old antique used book And it's got that specific old book smell, right?
We would say that is like musty or even think of some grandpa's.
Maybe think of like, if you can remember the smell of your grandpa's sweater, you know it's got that old kind of musty smell to it.
I think the jacket smelt like that, but times 20.
Like it was very strong, super, super, super musty, super funky.
And so I had to figure out a way to get the smell out of these jackets.
And so it was weird that it happened to both of them.
And all of the other clothes that were in storage were totally fine.
All of my sweaters were fine.
Other clothes, no issues.
Winter jackets, pants, no issues.
Just these two barber jackets.
So, of course, I went onto the internet and I tried to find a solution, and I found many solutions about how to clean your barber jacket.
Many people actually complained about them having a bad smell.
So I think maybe I'm not alone.
Maybe this is kind of an issue that happens to barber jackets.
I'm not sure.
But many people were complaining about their jackets having a bad smell, and there were a whole different range of solutions.
And so I started with the easiest one first, because why go and do a bunch of hard work if you can do it the easy way?
So some people said that what you should do is just go hang your jackets in the sun and let that sunlight hit the jacket and naturally disinfect it and eliminate the smell.
And so that's what I did.
I waited for a sunny day.
I went outside.
I put my jackets in the sun and I let them sit outside for several days.
And I even moved them around in my yard so that they would get maximum sunlight exposure.
And after being outside for three or four days, I took them inside and I gave it the sniff test.
Sniff is this action that we use with our nose, right?
I'm not sure if you can hear that on the microphone or not, but a sniff is when we breathe in deeply with our nose to smell something and to see what it smells like.
So I gave it the sniff test and I let my wife do a sniff test as well and Fail, fail.
They didn't improve at all.
They still smelled exactly the same way.
So that was a bust.
That was a failure.
The next method that I tried was the second easiest method, and that was to put them in the freezer.
So some people said that they had some success by putting their smelly barber jackets in the freezer and letting them freeze.
And I guess if there's like some bacteria, some bad smelling bacteria or something in the jacket, that that could kill the bacteria and eliminate the odor that way.
So I put them in plastic bags and folded them up neatly and put the jackets in my freezer.
And again, it was kind of set it and forget it.
So I just put them into the freezer and then didn't think about them again.
And then several days later, I remembered, oh yeah, my jackets.
And I took them out, gave them the sniff test and yeah, no success.
They both stunk and they were very cold.
Rock hard, ice hard, stinky jackets.
So those were the two easiest steps to try and solve this problem is just putting them outside and putting them in the freezer, but no luck.
So the next step was to try some spray.
So I tried a fabric spray.
I went to the store and got one of those odor eliminating fabric sprays that you can just spray on clothes or on furniture to remove a smell.
And I those to an extent masked the bad smell and covered it up.
When I say masked, it's almost like we're putting a mask on our face.
We're putting a cover over the bad smell.
So, you know, they smell kind of like a perfume or cologne, right?
They have this nice odor to them, nice scent to them, but it didn't really eliminate the bad smell in the jacket.
It just covered it up.
It just masked it.
So then it smelled kind of like fabric spray, combined with the bad smell of the jackets, that musky smell.
So that was almost worse even.
And so terrible.
Had to find another solution.
So then another thing that I read online was that you could spray it with vodka.
And somebody said that they had really great success giving their jacket a vodka bath and And so I tried that as well.
And again, no dice, no dice.
And no dice means no luck.
So I had no luck.
I had no dice.
And the jackets were just really bad.
And stressed me out because these jackets aren't really cheap.
They're rather expensive, actually.
It's like one of the most expensive items that I own, I would say, for clothing.
It's up there. one of my more expensive big ticket items.
And like I said, I look really good in them.
I think I feel good in them.
And so I really wanted to save these jackets.
I didn't want to just like throw them out or have to buy a new one or something like that.
And so I thought I need to enlist the help of a pro, of a professional, and enlist the help.
This is just a phrase that we mean to use like get the help or help.
Usually, i think we use it when we're saying like we want to hire somebody.
We'll give somebody some money to do something.
We'll enlist their help.
So i needed to enlist the help of a pro to help me clean these jackets and get them back to new.
So i went onto the korean internet And I searched around for some different cleaning solutions and I actually found a guy online and was able to connect with him through Instagram, weirdly enough who is like a barber cleaning specialist.
He's got this small local business where that's all he does is like clean and restore barber jackets.
And I think here in South Korea, especially, barber is a pretty famous famous popular brand.
I see a lot of guys my age in their late 30s to 40s to 50s wearing this jacket, especially in the fall.
So I think it is a popular brand here.
And yeah, it's cool that he's able to have a business where he just cleans and restores barber jackets.
So that was like the perfect fit.
And I read all of the reviews.
And then I messaged him and I was like, where's your store?
I'll come pop by your store.
And then he messaged back.
He's like, I don't really have a storefront.
I just do this business out of my home.
So he gave me his address and he's like just send me your jackets and I'll clean them and then mail them back to you.
And he actually lives quite a ways away from me in a different city.
And so I was like, yeah, okay, no problem.
I didn't even question that this might be a sketchy thing to do at all.
So I just sent him the money and sent him my jacket.
And then, after I did that, my wife was like are you crazy that you just sent your jackets and money to a stranger, just like believing and trusting the stranger that he's going to fix your problem and send you back some fresh smelling jackets?
And so I thought, hmm.
Maybe that wasn't the greatest idea, but he had lots of reviews on his website and social media.
And I thought it would be weird.
Like, why would somebody want to steal dirty jackets?
I mean, I guess if you had the skills, you could restore them and then sell them again.
But In order to get the jackets, you would have to give me your legit address.
And so it just seemed like a really weird crime to do if you were going to steal jackets this way and steal money this way.
And so I was kind of assured that probably it would be okay.
Just going through the thoughts in my head like that, I assured myself, I reassured myself that it was going to be okay.
So anyways, I sent off the jackets and I waited a few weeks and I actually totally forgot that I had sent them.
And then again, my wife was like, hey, where are your jackets?
Like, hasn't it been two or three weeks since you sent them out?
Did the guy send you a message to say that he got your jackets okay and was working on them?
And I realized no, he actually didn't send me any messages and we hadn't communicated after that point.
So I was like, I got to find out, I got to see what's going on with my jacket.
So I sent a message and then I got a reply saying yeah, he got my jackets but he was busy working on other jackets and that it was still going to be a week or two.
But don't worry, he got them and he's going to work on them.
And so I thought yeah, these barber jackets.
Actually they must have a pretty bad problem with the smell if he's so busy working on other people's jackets.
But yeah, a couple of weeks went by and he sent them to me and I received them.
So absolutely no problems with the service.
Everything was okay.
And the best thing was the smell. is now gone.
They are no longer funky jackets at all.
They smell back to normal.
And he even packaged them really nice in these plastic bags with the barber branding.
And he gave me some little packets that are like dehumidifier packets.
I guess they suck up any moisture in the air so that the coats couldn't get moldy or funky again to put in the pockets of the jacket.
So Really good service and they smell fine.
They look good.
They're all nice and clean, all restored, re-waxed.
I paid a little bit of extra money to get them re-waxed and restored back to brand new.
They're as good as new.
Now, as I mentioned, this story happened last year.
And while this whole kerfuffle was going on, trying to get my jackets restored and cleaned, most of the autumn passed by.
So I actually didn't get to wear these jackets last autumn for very long.
And One of the worst things about living in Korea, I really do enjoy living in this country.
Otherwise, I wouldn't be here.
But the climate is one of the things that's a little bit unfortunate.
We have a beautiful spring and a beautiful fall, but they're very short.
We have a cold winter and a hot summer and they're very long.
So that means, this nice jacket wearing season in the fall and sometimes a little bit in the spring as well, is really really short.
You only get to wear your beautiful fall jacket for five or six weeks before you have to get into your winter coat.
And so that meant that last year I didn't get to wear my jacket very much at all.
But this year, guys, I'm going to be able to wear these jackets for the whole season.
I just recently took them out of storage and Thankfully, they still smell fresh.
They still look great.
And I'm going to enjoy wearing these jackets as much as I can this autumn season.
Thank you for listening to the story of my funky jacket.
And just before I let you go, I wanted to share some common adjectives and words and phrases and expressions that English speakers use to talk about bad smells, because in fact, there are are a lot of different words and expressions that we have.
I made some notes here in my notebook and I wrote down one two three four five six seven eight, eight different adjectives that I could brainstorm that we use to talk about bad smells.
And I think even while telling my story here, I probably mentioned some other ones as well.
So let me break them down for you and tell you what we use them for and what kind of smells we describe with them.
So let's start mild and then we'll go to extreme.
Okay, at the mild end of the spectrum we have two words that I think I used already in this episode.
The first one is musty, musty, M-U-S-T-Y, musty.
And this describes old things that just don't smell very fresh.
Think about, like I said, an old book, a grandfather's old sweater.
I like to collect records and I have old records from the 50s and the 60s.
And when I open those old LP records, often the inside of the cover smells musty.
It's like this old smell.
Next up we have stale and stale is a smell of just not being fresh.
Think about a really stuffy room where maybe there's no circulation and the air is not fresh in that room.
You would say that that smells stale.
And we also use this word to talk about bread that isn't fresh anymore.
So if bread has gone hard and it's lost its softness and its freshness, we would call that stale bread.
So that word stale just means not fresh.
Moving up to like the middle level of a bad smell, we have this word pungent.
Pungent.
Pungent.
P-U-N-G-E-N-T.
And pungent describes...
Strong smells.
Maybe you could say food is pungent.
Maybe garlic or onions or like a strong cheese.
They could be pungent.
Also, body odors, like maybe somebody's BO.
That is the bad sweaty smell that comes from armpits.
We call it BO, body odor.
Pungent BO, or if somebody had really bad breath, like maybe after eating a bunch of garlic You got a whiff of their bad breath.
You'd be like, whew, that's pungent, some pungent bad breath.
Okay.
Not a good smell.
I don't like a pungent smell.
Does anybody really?
Probably not.
Okay, next going up to the stronger level.
Okay, the next level up.
We have this word rancid rancid, r-a-n-c-i-d rancid.
And we use this mostly to talk about food that has gone bad, especially oil and butter.
So if you left butter out for too long or oil out for too long and it started to smell and was just bad, that would be rancid.
Also, we use this word in a comical way to describe people's farts or when they pass gas, right?
When someone has gas and they let it out of their body.
Usually with a fart at the back end, we say sometimes, oh, that's rancid.
Oh, okay.
Like that.
Another word that we use, as I mentioned here many times in this episode is funky.
Okay, funky is just like an unpleasant smell and usually like a weird smell.
We say you can't put your finger on it.
You can't really identify it.
And that's why I use this word to describe my jacket is because I had a hard time describing the kind of bad smell it was.
It's kind of like a combination of moldy and musky and stale.
And it's hard to describe.
So we say funky.
And we also use it as a noun too.
We could say, oh, that's got a funk to it.
Maybe my jacket had a funk to it.
So we can describe a bad smell that way.
It's got a funk.
It's funky.
Don't get it confused with the fashion style funky, meaning really bright and colorful.
Also, we can use this word to talk about music.
If a track is really funky.
A song is really funky means it's got a good beat, good groove, very upbeat music and yeah, funky music just like the genre funk music.
Okay, so a very dynamic word in English that we can use to describe many different things.
And then let's get to the very strong end of the spectrum.
So we have three adjectives we can describe.
Really, really bad smells.
One is putrid, putrid, P-U-T-R-I-D, putrid.
And I would say this is almost like a very, very extreme smell.
I wrote a decaying body or like...
Something rotting, you know, like a dead animal or even a dead human's body decomposing and rotting.
That would be putrid.
Okay, thankfully I haven't had to smell too many putrid things in my life, but...
Again, sometimes we use this word in a comical way to describe people's farts.
Like, that's putrid.
Oh, get out of here.
The next one, foul, F-O-U-L.
If something is foul, again, it's just like a word that we use in general.
It's a general word that we can use to describe really bad smells.
I think also a lot of body smells.
Maybe after someone uses the bathroom and then you walk into the bathroom, it could smell quite foul if the air hasn't cleared out yet.
Okay.
Maybe a rotten egg could smell foul.
Sometimes, if you go to an area where there's like farming activities taking place, it could smell foul.
Farms with like fertilizer could smell foul.
Hot springs with sulfur in the air, they can smell foul, this kind of thing.
And then finally, the last one is to reek.
Reek.
R-E-E-K.
It reeks.
And this is just, yeah, an extremely bad smell.
Again, in general, anything that smells extremely bad, we can say it reeks.
Okay.
And...
Often we use it as a phrase, it reeks of something.
So if somebody is like a chain smoker and they smoke a lot of cigarettes, then that person probably reeks of smoke, right?
They smell like cigarette smoke.
They reek of smoke.
Or Maybe if somebody was an alcoholic and they drink alcohol a lot, their breath could reek of alcohol.
You could say he or she reeks of alcohol.
And it just means that they smell really bad because of that thing, because of the smoke, because of the alcohol.
And yeah, we use it as the phrase, it reeks often, right?
You could walk into a room that smells really bad and be like it reeks in here, meaning it smells really bad.
So yeah, we have a lot of interesting dynamic vocabulary to talk about.
Bad smells in English, wouldn't you know?
Well, guys, I think that's going to bring me to the end of this episode.
Not the most pleasant topic to talk about these kind of bad smells.
But I hope I entertained you with a funny story.
And I want to congratulate you at least for making it to the end of this lesson.
You put in the time, you put in the effort today to improve your English.
And I really got to say that I respect that and admire you for that.
So keep going.
You're doing awesome and this is what you need to do to keep building your english is incorporating it into your lifestyle, spending time with english each and every day and putting in those seconds and minutes and hours.
It will all build up to helping you become a clearer and more confident English speaker.
So keep up the good work.
Of course, we've got hundreds of other lessons over on our website, QLips.com.
Check it out.
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So guys, please take care.
Have an awesome week of English studying up ahead.
And I will catch you in the next episode.
Until then, bye-bye.
