Hey everybody, welcome to another phrasal verb episode.
I hope you're all doing great.
I hope your English learning is going really well and that you feel like you're learning a lot of phrasal verbs now that you're listening to these phrasal verb episodes.
And in today's episode, we're going to look at two phrasal verbs.
The first one is blow off and and the other one is blow out.
So let's first define these two phrasal verbs.
Blow off means to ignore or dismiss something or someone.
So for example, I could say, I told the doctor about my fears, but he just blew me off.
So here I'm saying that.
I talked to my doctor, told him about the things that were worrying me about my health maybe and he just ignored my fears and just pretended like it was no big deal and just dismissed my fear.
He blew me off.
So that's blow off.
And blow out means to defeat an opponent by a lot, by a wide margin.
For example, I could say the Yankees blew out the Red Sox 11 to 0.
This means that the Yankees defeated the Red Sox by many points, right?
By a wide margin, 11 to 0.
Okay.
They blew them out.
So that's blowout.
All right.
Now, I wanna talk about a couple different things.
And while I'm talking, I'm gonna use these two phrasal verbs over and over again in different sentences so that you can hear them again and again And hopefully, by the end of this episode, you'll feel comfortable with these phrasal verbs.
And maybe you'll even feel like you can use them in your own sentences.
Okay?
So first, let me tell you a fictional story.
This story is not real.
About my friend's problem at work.
So my friend recently had this issue with his boss.
Why?
Well, because my friend had some concerns about a project that they were working on And he brought those concerns to his boss and his boss blew him off over and over again.
So first of all, my friend thought that it was not feasible to finish the project on time.
When something is not feasible, this means that it's not realistic to be able to do that thing.
So it can't be done realistically.
So he told his boss that it just wasn't feasible to finish the project on time.
And the boss blew him off and thought that his concern was ridiculous and that he just needed to go back to work.
And my friend had brought this concern up because he he saw that the deadline was approaching and the pace at which they were working was simply not fast enough.
There was no way they were gonna finish before the deadline.
And he even laid this out very clearly for his boss.
When you lay something out clearly, it means that you explain it in a very clear way.
So he laid it out very clearly for his boss.
He showed his boss their pace, their rhythm, at which they were working and how that wasn't fast enough to finish by the deadline.
But his boss just kind of acted like that.
It wasn't a big concern.
He just blew him off and the boss just went back to working on other stuff.
So that's the first occasion on which my friend's boss blew him off.
And then he also had another concern.
My friend didn't think that they were capable of fulfilling all the requirements.
So he wasn't only concerned about finishing on time.
He was also concerned about just being able to do all the things that they were required to do.
They just didn't have all of the different tools or the different things they needed to fulfill the requirements of what needed to be done.
And he told his boss about this and his boss blew him off again and just ignored his concerns and told him to go back to work.
So he blew him off a second time.
And my friend also thought that there were some things that were just outside their range of expertise.
He thought that the team just didn't have the expertise, the experience, the skills in order to do some of the things, especially some of the technical things that needed to be done.
And this was a big concern because if they weren't able to do this then the project would be a complete failure because the final product would not work correctly, obviously.
And he brought this concern to his boss and You can probably guess that his boss blew him off again and said that my friend's concerns were unfounded, meaning they had no base in reality.
And he said that the team had all the expertise they needed.
They had the necessary skills.
It wouldn't be a problem.
So he blew him off again.
And lastly, my friend also thought that there were going to be some glitches, like some technical problems with some of the features of of the product and also some major issues as well.
They were already experiencing this while they were testing out the product and they weren't really able to fix all of these 100.
And my friend brought this concern to his boss.
And you guessed it, his boss blew him off again and said it'll be fine.
You'll figure it out.
Just keep working on it.
So his boss blew him off again, did not care about any of these concerns.
And at the end of the day, the project ended up being a complete disaster.
Once it launched, There were so many problems glitches, major issues because, number one they had to rush, because they had to meet this unrealistic deadline.
So they launched the product even though there were all these problems that they weren't able to solve, because they didn't have the expertise, the skills.
So the project ended up being a disaster.
And my friend kind of thought in his mind, I told you so.
He didn't say this to his boss, but he thought it in his mind because he He told his boss many times that there were problems, but his boss kept blowing him off time and time again.
He didn't want to listen to any of these concerns, and the result of that was disaster of a project, a disaster of a product, and many customers complained and wrote terrible reviews, and they actually had to redo the entire project again and hire other people who had more expertise, more experience, more skills, and so my friend's boss shouldn't have blown him off, And of course, they all paid the price for that.
So now let me talk about something else.
Let me talk about some different times when sports teams that I was on or I
I was somewhat affiliated with got blown out.
Let me first tell you this story about a soccer team that I was on when I was 11 years old.
I think, and we were a pretty good team in terms of like our performance in our league.
When we played against other teams in our league, we usually won and we had some good people on our team and for some reason I don't remember why, but during one of our practices we We played against an older girls team.
So these girls were probably like 15 or 16 years old.
So they were probably four or five years older than us.
And so we were younger boys and they were older girls.
And we played a scrimmage against them.
A scrimmage is like a practice match.
So we scrimmaged against them and they blew us out.
It wasn't even close.
And it was surprising to me because I thought we were pretty good.
We played pretty well.
We had good players on our team, some strong people on our team.
But let me tell you, those older girls bullied us, meaning they were stronger than a lot of us.
They were able to push us down.
It was a little bit humbling, let's say, because...
I felt like we just got demolished.
We got blown out by this older girls team.
And I think we were all disappointed in our performance.
We thought that we would at least make it a good game and make it a close game.
But it wasn't even close.
They blew us out.
They were better than us.
They were stronger than us.
They had more skills than us.
They were more organized than us.
I think they were like a high school team.
So they were just a lot more organized than us.
They... had probably practiced together a lot more than us.
They were much more competitive than us because we were just kids.
It wasn't like a high school team or anything.
And sports don't get that competitive until high school in the US.
That's when they get really competitive.
So we just weren't at that level yet and these girls blew us out in that scrimmage.
So that's the first match that comes to mind when I think of past blowouts.
I can also think of some times when I played basketball in high school where we played against pretty good teams and Our team was never that good, to be honest.
We could compete against average teams.
We could beat a lot of average teams.
And of course, we could beat the teams that were not good.
But good teams sometimes blew us out. there were times when we just could not compete with them.
They were way better than us.
And I can remember a couple of really bad blowouts where by halftime you already knew that the game was over.
There was no possible way that we would come back and beat them.
And Sometimes the other team would just switch to its backup players, its bench players, to rest their starters, because they already knew that the game was over.
They had blown us out.
There was no way we were going to come back and win.
So there were a couple really bad blowouts.
Like on some of those really good teams, There were incredible athletes like people that could dunk the ball.
A dunk in basketball is where the person can actually jump high enough to throw the ball down into the basket.
I think you know what I'm talking about.
So none of us could dunk in a game.
But they had some people that could dunk and jump super high and run super fast and sometimes we just couldn't compete physically with them and they blew us out.
So...
That happened sometimes.
There were sometimes when we blew out the other team, but I can only really remember one bad team that we would sometimes play.
And it was always so fun to play against them because they were like the worst team in the area.
And we were actually able to blow them out a couple times.
And it's fun to be on that side of the blowout, not on the losing side.
So it was fun to blow them out a couple times.
But that only happened with that one really bad team.
And one other type of blowout that I wanted to include here.
I wasn't on the team, but my high school football team would sometimes get blown out by other teams.
And I can't really remember how good we were against other schools, but I would say that we definitely weren't anywhere near the top in terms of the rankings.
So we never had that much talent.
And so there were times when our high school team would get blown out by other high school football teams.
And that didn't make the football game boring because I've talked about this before.
Football games in high school are really fun social events.
Everyone wants to go to the football games because you don't just watch the game.
You walk around, socialize, eat.
There's always something going on beyond just the sport.
And so, even if our team was getting blown out by another team, that didn't really affect the socializing and all the other stuff that was going on.
So even if our team was getting blown out by halftime, For example, people would still stay because it was a social event and people wanted to socialize and walk around and eat and do different things.
And some people are just good fans.
They're good supporters of, of their local team or whatever, and they're not going to leave just because their team is losing by a lot.
So those fans are the fans that every sports team wants.
They don't want fans that will just get up and leave as soon as they start losing a game or something.
So our high school football team got blown out several times, but it wasn't that big of a deal for a lot of us, because we weren't only there for the football.
So I hope that as I was talking, you were able to hear these two phrasal verbs used many, many times and hopefully you have a good feel for them now and maybe you can even use them in your own sentences.
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All right.
Thank you so much for listening to this phrasal verb episode, and I'll talk to you in the next one.
