Hello everyone and welcome back to another lesson here at EnglishPod.
My name is Marco.
And my name is Catherine.
So, Marco, what are we talking about today?
Today we're talking about a very interesting topic.
You've probably seen it on every TV show or American movie, and it's a bachelor party.
Uh-oh.
Yeah.
I've heard bad things.
Bad things about a bachelor party.
Well, they can be fun, but at times they can be a little bit too excessive, too much.
But before we get started on the dialogue, why don't we take a look at Vocabulary Preview.
Vocabulary preview.
Well, the first one we've got here is the topic of today.
This is the bachelor party.
So what is a bachelor exactly?
Right.
Well, a bachelor is a person who is not married.
A single person.
A single guy, specifically.
All right.
So it's a man.
Man.
Before he's married.
Right.
So for women, you would say a bachelorette.
Okay, bachelor is a guy and a bachelorette is a girl.
And so we don't really say bachelorette except when we're talking about this party.
Right.
So a bachelor party is a party that a guy has the day before he's married, or maybe two or three days before he actually gets married.
So it's a night where all his friends get together.
They go out.
They have some drinks.
They have some fun.
And just like the last extreme fun he will have before he gets married.
All right, and so it's all his guy friends.
All his guy friends.
Only guys, no girls.
And the bachelorette party is only girls, and it's when a girl's friends take her out before she gets married to celebrate her last night or two of being unmarried.
Right, exactly.
So not only guys' parties can get a little bit crazy, but girls' bachelorette parties can also get kind of crazy, right?
That's true.
So, before we start talking about what exactly goes on at some of these parties, let's take a listen to today's dialogue and hear what happens to our main characters.
Hi, honey.
You'll never guess what.
My friends Julie and Alex are getting married.
Wow, that's great news.
They're a great couple.
I know.
Anyways, I just talked to Alex's best man, and he is organizing the bachelor party.
It's going to be so much fun.
All the groomsmen are thinking up all the wacky and crazy things we're going to do that night.
You aren't going to a strip club, are you?
I don't want you getting a lap dance from some stripper with the excuse that it's your friend's party.
Ah, come on.
It's just some innocent fun.
You know how these things are.
We're going to play drinking games, get him some gag gifts, and just have a good time.
Nothing too over the top.
Well, I don't know.
Come on.
If one of your friends was getting married, I wouldn't mind you going to her bachelorette party.
Good, because my friend Wendy's getting married and I'm organizing her party.
What?
All right, great.
So apparently both of them have parties to go to, but I don't think the guy was too happy about it.
I don't think so either.
And that's the funny thing.
I think a lot of girls are like, oh, well, my husband-to-be, he wants to have a party.
It's okay.
But the minute the girl wants to have the party, the guy is like, uh-uh, no way.
That's true.
I guess, but we can talk a little bit more about this towards the end.
Before we start on this really interesting topic, why don't we take a look at some of the language on Language Takeaway?
Language takeaway.
Well, Marco, the first few words are actually more wedding terms than bachelor party terms.
The first one is best man.
Right, the best man.
So the best man is, who is he exactly?
He's usually the groom's best friend.
So the groom is the man getting married, and his best friend has the position of best man.
So he has some special things to do at the wedding.
He has to make a speech, for example.
Uh-huh. and he has to stand next to his friend when the friend gets married.
Right.
And it's just a very special position of honor that the best friend has in his friend's wedding.
Okay, and among those responsibilities, the best man is usually the one that has to organize the bachelor party, right?
Exactly.
Okay, so best man.
And well, the rest of the groom's friends are also present at the wedding and they are called the groomsmen.
Right.
All right.
So groom groomsmen.
And so usually these are maybe three to five guys, three to five men who are friends of the groom or brother of the bride.
It depends on the wedding.
And they stand with the man when he gets married.
And so they kind of have a lot of responsibilities as well.
Okay, and the groomsmen usually are also present at the bachelor party.
Exactly.
All right.
Now, moving on to a bit more colorful language, we have a place here, a strip club.
Okay, so sometimes you see these in movies oftentimes or films.
For example, the TV show The Sopranos.
This is often a place where Tony Soprano goes.
A strip club is a club.
It's like a bar that's open most of the day and night, where there are women who take their clothes off for money.
All right.
So you have the verb to strip, right?
A strip club.
So the verb to strip means to take off or leave without something.
Right, so you can strip off your clothes.
So it's usually used with clothes, right, to take off clothes, to strip.
So you have a strip club and in the strip club you have the, as you mentioned, the girls that are dancing and taking off their clothes.
They are called strippers.
Okay, so stripper is a person who takes off their clothes as their job.
And you can have male strippers or female strippers.
So usually just saying stripper is a woman and a male stripper is actually a guy.
Okay, so you have this club.
That's very common in many countries, and all the strippers are dancing.
And now they also talked about getting a lap dance.
Okay, now this is getting a little bit dirty.
Lap is a well.
It's not really a part of your body, but when you sit down in a chair, your lap is the tops of your legs.
So you can, you know, you can hold something in your lap, like your backpack.
Or maybe, for example, if you have a child that's three or four years old, you would sit him on your lap, right on your legs, while you're sitting down, maybe in Subway.
Right, or a laptop computer is the kind of computer you can hold on your lap.
So a lap dance is when one of the female strippers comes and kind of dances on your lap.
Exactly, and so it's a sexy dance.
You pay for it extra, and it's something that is very popular with young men and people who you know these grooms and groomsmen before the groom gets married.
Right, all right.
And moving on, we have the last word for today, gag gifts.
All right, gag gifts are joke gifts.
They're meant to be funny.
They're not meant to be serious.
Right.
And they're very popular at these kinds of bachelor parties and bachelorette parties.
One kind of gag gift that's just very silly is like a whoopee cushion.
You know, it's like a balloon you put on someone's seat and when they sit down they make a farting sound.
Right.
So those are gag gifts, anything that's kind of for to joke around.
It's not really useful.
It's not like giving somebody a T-shirt, right?
Right, or a gift card is a nice gift.
It's not a gag gift.
Right.
So there are a lot of different types of gag gifts and actually some of them are pretty good and funny, like spicy chewing gum or the electric shocker.
Oh, yeah.
When you shake somebody's hand.
That's really funny.
All right, so we've taken a look at a lot of words on Language Takeaway, so let's listen to this dialogue again and we'll be right back with Fluency Builder.
Hi, honey.
You'll never guess what.
My friends Julie and Alex are getting married.
Wow, that's great news.
They're a great couple.
I know.
Anyways, I just talked to Alex's best man, and he is organizing the bachelor party.
It's going to be so much fun.
All the groomsmen are thinking up all the wacky and crazy things we're going to do that night.
You aren't going to a strip club, are you?
I don't want you getting a lap dance from some stripper with the excuse that it's your friend's party.
Ah, come on.
It's just some innocent fun.
You know how these things are.
We're going to play drinking games, get him some gag gifts, and just have a good time.
Nothing too over the top.
Well, I don't know.
Come on.
If one of your friends was getting married, I wouldn't mind you going to her bachelorette party.
Good, because my friend Wendy's getting married and I'm organizing her party.
What?
All right, we're back.
So now let's look at some of the phrases that were used in this dialogue on Fluency Builder.
Fluency Builder.
All right.
So at the beginning of this dialogue, we meet this couple, this man and woman.
And the guy says, hey, honey, you'll never guess what.
All right.
Okay, my friends are getting married.
So what does this mean?
You'll never guess what.
It's just a phrase that you would use to give really, really important or exciting news.
It's like, guess what?
Okay, so you'll never guess what happened to me.
I won the lottery.
Right.
It's so amazing or it's so uncommon or unusual that you would probably never guess that person won the lottery.
Okay, so you'll never guess what.
Right.
You'll never guess what.
Or you can say, guess what?
I won the lottery.
Okay.
All right.
And our second phrase, you know how these things are.
Okay, so this is a phrase that people often use when they want to remind someone that this is tradition or this is a habit.
It's a common thing.
And so oftentimes, when people are having problems at work and they say, Oh gosh, this person's just not listening to me.
Someone to help them out will say, You know how these things are.
It takes some time to resolve a problem.
Or you could say, Oh, gosh.
This is going to be a horrible party.
I don't want you guys to go to a strip club.
It's so dirty.
Right.
And you'd say, well, you know how these things are.
It's tradition.
You have to do it.
You have to do it.
Right.
So this is what he meant, right?
You know how these things are.
It's like, I don't really have a choice.
It's a tradition.
This is what guys do when they're going to get married.
So we have to do it.
It's almost like saying, don't worry about it.
There's really nothing to worry about.
All right.
And our last phrase, and our last phrase is something that we'd never want to happen.
Something to be over the top.
Well, it's not necessarily a bad thing, okay?
So we could say that it was a really ridiculous party.
It was really over the top.
They had a clown and they had people dressed up like Star Trek characters.
You know, something that is more than normal.
It's almost silly the way that it's all just kind of crazy.
And yeah, it's too much in every way.
Right.
So it couldn't be something bad.
Like, for example, someone's behavior was over the top.
It was too much.
It was too intense.
Right.
Or like, oh my gosh, did you see her coat?
It's really over the top.
It's like purple with sprinkles on it.
Right.
So it can be used in different ways, but it usually means it's excessive.
It's too much.
Exactly.
All right.
So some interesting phrases on this occasion as well.
Let's listen to our dialogue for the last time and we'll be back.
Okay.
Hi, honey.
You'll never guess what.
My friends Julie and Alex are getting married.
Wow, that's great news.
They're a great couple.
I know.
Anyways, I just talked to Alex's best man, and he is organizing the bachelor party.
It's gonna be so much fun.
All the groomsmen are thinking up all the wacky and crazy things we're gonna do that night.
You aren't going to a strip club, are you?
I don't want you getting a lap dance from some stripper with the excuse that it's your friend's party.
Ah, come on.
It's just some innocent fun.
You know how these things are.
We're going to play drinking games, get him some gag gifts, and just have a good time.
Nothing too over the top.
Well, I don't know.
Come on.
If one of your friends was getting married, I wouldn't mind you going to her bachelorette party.
Good, because my friend Wendy's getting married and I'm organizing her party.
What?
All right, we're back.
So bachelor and bachelorette parties.
Have you ever been to a bachelorette party?
I have not yet, but one of my closest friends is getting married in a couple of weeks.
And so I will be attending and helping organize a bachelor party.
So do you have anything in mind?
Nothing I can talk about.
These things are meant to be surprises oftentimes, so I don't want to spoil it.
But I will tell you that my boyfriend just organized a bachelor party for his best friend.
He was the best man in the wedding.
And it was very crazy.
Oh, really?
Did they also go to Vegas and do some of these things that we saw in the dialogue?
They didn't go to Vegas, but they did some of the things we heard about in today's dialogue.
They went to a strip club.
They got lap dances.
They drank a lot.
It was very over the top.
And I think this is something that most of our listeners probably have seen in TV shows or in movies or in different type of exposure of American culture, which is, It's actually very, very common in Canada, the United States.
I'm not really sure about Europe.
England it is too.
Really?
My friend said that his friend was getting married and they all went to Portugal for a week to have a bachelor party.
And I heard something about mud wrestling.
Wow.
Well, I guess it's different in every country.
And this is the interesting part.
We want to know how these things are in your country.
Do you have any traditions or any fun stuff that you do before the wedding?
Maybe after?
I don't know.
What about Ecuador?
We usually, we don't really have strip clubs, actually.
That makes it easy.
Yeah.
So we usually just do what we do every night.
Just go out with friends.
Drink and dance.
Drink and dance.
Play the guitar.
Or, yeah, maybe some gag gifts or some prank that we pull on the groom.
But nothing too over the top.
So, yeah, we're really interested in knowing how it is in your country.
So come to EnglishPod.com.
Leave your questions, comments.
And we'll see you guys next time.
Until then, bye, everyone.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.
