This is the Business English Podcast, Episode 380, Accidents Happen, How to Say You Made a Mistake at Work.
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Terms apply. Hey there, Michelle.
How are you doing today?
I'm good, Lindsay. How are you?
I'm great. I'm great.
Do you have a question today?
I do. Have you ever insulted someone by accident?
Oh, yeah. I mean, this is hard to avoid if you're out in the world.
Yeah, sometimes I will say something and then I'll, I will think, I realize I wasn't thinking when I said something, you know, you're not trying to hurt someone on purpose, but maybe you made a comment that is about them, but not about them.
Yeah. It can happen, Michelle.
What about you? Yeah, of course.
I think that, you know, it can happen where you inadvertently, you know, insult someone and it's just so uncomfortable.
Then you feel bad or have you ever thought, Oh no, did this person take this the wrong way?
Or I hope they didn't think I meant it like this and oh that's honestly yeah it's more that it's my neuroses of same and 90 of the time the person is fine not right they didn't even notice but then i go crazy yeah that's where we've discovered we're very similar lindsay i think we're both a little neurotic
probably yeah ruminating right i'm a ruminator for sure yeah well that's okay that's okay that's okay we're very caring people so yes yeah i mean that's actually a good thing because it's a sign that you care.
I don't want to hurt people in the world, right?
And if I feel like I may have, that tears me up inside.
So that's what it is.
But I do love that you said the word inadvertently.
Yes. Inadvertently.
That is a super high level.
If you're taking IELTS, it's a band nine phrase.
It's a C1 phrase. I love it.
What does it mean, Michelle?
Well, we are actually going to get into it later on the episode.
So that's going to be an ever that we go over, but it's the same idea of you didn't mean to do something so we'll talk about it more in a little bit because we have a great listener question we're going to get into um and it's about some very important expressions and phrases involving mistakes but before
we get into that we want to say thank you to someone who reviewed us and we're so thankful for them yes special thank you to petra Rajabinen from Slovakia who reviewed us on January 11th.
And it looks like Petra left us six stars.
She left us five stars and then a star in the review, which says, thank you.
Amazing. Thank you, Petra.
We love your review.
We love reading your name out loud on the show.
And we'd like to know from more of our business English listeners what you think of the podcast.
So guys, go over and leave a review wherever you listen, Apple Podcasts, Spotify.
Tell us what you think about the show and leave your listener question yes absolutely we love that and we love your questions so let's read a question today lindsay what is the question all right here it is hi lindsay aubry and michelle hope you've been doing amazingly well i am victor writing from taiwan i've
been a longtime listener for a couple of years your voice and laughter have been a great companion for me while i commute daily oh michelle that is amazing i love this warm your heart it does it really really does thank you victor it means so much to us i've learned so much and picked up new vocabs
and phrases naturally from all the great work you put together in the three channels of all ears english thank you so much you guys are a hidden gem for those who learn english as their second language beautiful all right so here's the question from victor recently i got confused with several synonyms
of the phrase by accident i heard people use by fluke by accident and by mistake from time to time i'm curious about other alternatives and wonder if these are all interchangeable or if there's actually subtle differences among them hope this will get answered thank you so much and again thank you for your
incredible work sincerely yours victor beautiful what a question and what a nice email thank you so much oh it's amazing all right let's get to it to answer this question for victor and all of our business english listeners yes so yeah Why is this helpful for business?
Why did I snatch this for the Business English Podcast?
I mean, this is important to know if something was intentional or unintentional, right?
Because things happen in life.
But if you can explain, you know, if you made a mistake and you didn't mean to, it was an accident, it was, you know, not intentional, that changes things.
Right. Exactly. so you can express that you made the mistake or maybe telling someone is okay they made a mistake or you could be telling a story there are so many ways that this could come up at work um so let's get into it so first one victor was asking about was by accident and this is a mistake
it's the opposite of on purpose right you didn't mean to do something so often you might hear a kid say this yeah like uh oh I didn't mean to hit her it was by accident or it was an accident yeah it was an accident good um so some examples when it comes to the working world you might hear oh no I called
the meeting for during lunch by accident I'll send out the updated time okay or um if you don't hit this button by accident it's okay because the system will automatically update itself yeah okay good yeah and I think a mistake I hear a lot I feel like I even make this mistake is on accident I did it
on accident I I hear it a lot yeah I do hear people say on accident um goodbye yeah goodbye so I I feel like the more formal appropriate work way maybe using accidental in other forms so like I accidentally called you sorry about that or right it wasn't if it was an accident, it's okay.
But we just have to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Right? So to me, by accident.
Sounds a little juvenile to you.
That's what I think.
Yeah, I probably am in that camp too.
Yeah, if it sounds a little juvenile, maybe something a kid would say or a parent to a kid or just friends, maybe button it up a little bit for work.
Right, right. It's not like you're gonna get fired.
Oh my gosh, you used a casual word at work.
No. But in general, we want to try to uplevel our vocab for work yeah right exactly exactly so now let's go through uh by mistake what do you think about this one yeah i love this so this one is super useful equally useful um is there any difference michelle between by mistake and by accident so i was thinking
about this and at first i wrote not really and then i kind of elaborated because i was thinking a mistake may imply that it was something you could have not you you may not have known how to do to me, accident sounds more like a little more like a slip of the finger, right?
Or it could be more, it just, I, I don't know, I knocked into something, but, but really there are synonyms, it's not cinnamons.
Um, so I wouldn't even, yeah, exactly.
There's cinnamon rolls.
So I really wouldn't think too much about the difference here.
I know that Victor was asking, are there subtle differences?
I don't know. I wouldn't even worry about it.
What do you think? Yeah, i love that and i think the adjective that we could use there they're synonymous i love that one for us bonus bonus adjective or you can say cinnamon rolls if you want to cinnamon cinnamon anonymous oh that's kind of cool that might be a brand name of your next company or something amazing
open the cinnamon shop cinnamon roll shop i'll come by every day i love it yes synonymous is our bonus word for today so all right so yeah let's this example so i emailed the whole team by mistake.
I'm so embarrassed.
Oh yeah. And that can happen sometimes, right?
Yeah. That's the big one.
The reply all. Yeah.
That's what people get afraid of.
Oh yeah. Not good. But if you want to button it up a little bit, like Lindsay was talking about with accidental, because to me also, I don't know, there's something about the by accident by mistake that maybe it's the buy that feels very casual.
Do we have to say bye bye to the bye can we say bye bye to the bi love it yeah maybe when we enter our the workplace maybe but again like lindsay said no one's gonna be oh they said bye accident right it's it's just you know slightly more formal to use it in these ways so you could also say mistakenly
um or you could just say a mistake right yeah exactly so she mistakenly put in a few wrong numbers can we review this or it was a mistake to have the whole team vote on the new hire Yes.
Okay. Let's, let's answer the question about by fluke.
So to me, this is not, this is not cinnamon.
No, not synonymous.
Yeah, no, by fluke.
Yeah. I don't really hear by fluke.
So we do have the word, it was a fluke, the noun fluke, meaning, well, how would you define that?
Well, a fluke is, it happened.
We don't know why it happened.
Like, okay. So I'll give an example.
Lindsay and I we'd been in my in my new house Lindsay and I were getting uh the internet to work for my the place where I'm recording and everything seemed good and I was so happy and we had a really good week of recording and the internet was great everything was fine and then the next week it kind
of fell apart and we didn't know why and something that we kept on saying was we don't know if it was a fluke or because the next week it was fine again so it's something unexpected that it shouldn't have.
Yeah. It's something unexpected that probably like no real rhyme or reason for it.
Exactly. And life is full of this, right?
Just a fluke. I mean, we could do a whole episode on a fluke.
For sure. It's just something, again, no rhyme or reason to it.
It wasn't predicted.
There's no reason it happened.
It's not expected to happen again.
That kind of thing.
I love that. But we don't say buy fluke, right?
So let's get out of the buy.
And it was a fluke.
It must have been a fluke, right?
That bad recording day was a fluke.
Yes. So this is different from an accident or a mistake, really.
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All right. So the one that I like, fluke.
I think it's kind of cool.
Sounds cool. Sounds cool.
That was a fluke. It kind of, I like it because it describes a slightly different meaning than by mistake.
Like I wouldn't have said it was a mistake that your internet didn't upload that right right or by act or i wouldn't have said it was an accident that your internet didn't work that day i would the only thing i could really say there it's a fluke it's random right don't worry about it it's right whereas
a mistake or an accident you can kind of point to what happened right a fluke is um just there we don't know like it just happened that way one day there the bad internet connection happened and then watch i don't want to jinx myself though i know Right.
Yeah, exactly. And then once you see, if you start to see a pattern in things, then you would go and try to figure out what's going on and fix the problem.
But it's kind of the sort of thing where you're communicating.
It's okay. These things happen randomly.
We don't know why it's a fluke and you're not going to spend any mind energy worrying about it.
Okay. Exactly. All right.
Let's give a few before we head off, um, a few other ways to say this so the one is unintentional or unintentionally right and this is very high level very high level i unintentionally made her feel bad when i told her to review her work yeah so i would say when you use the word accident it's more surprising
right not planned but what do you think michelle what's the difference between by accident and unintentionally yeah Again, I wouldn't worry about this, but an accident, yeah, I was trying to think hard about this, and I wrote something, and now I'm starting, it's making my brain hurt.
What do you think, Lindsay?
No, I think, yeah, I think they essentially mean the same thing, right?
But I just think the biggest difference that our listeners need to know today is that unintentionally is a little higher level.
Yes, exactly. Yeah.
Yeah, and so is the next one.
Inadvertently, love this one.
We mentioned this one.
Inadvertently, very high level.
very similar to unintentional.
Unintentionally. Exactly.
So without realizing it, I inadvertently confused our clients.
I think I have to set up a meeting to clarify this.
Love that one. Very professional.
Yep. And then less formal is I didn't mean to something.
Right. So this is more similar to by accident.
So it's more informal.
I didn't mean to call you.
I meant to call Kylie.
love that yeah so which of these is the most useful for you at work michelle yeah it's a difference between useful and favorite um i think i like inadvertently yeah um but useful might be unintentionally i don't know what do you do yeah no i i i like I like both unintentionally and inadvertently, so I'm not going
to declare a winner.
Okay. All right. It's a talk.
Yeah. I mean, like we said, really the most important thing is, I mean, we could think all day about what are the real differences and is there a slight difference between this and that one, but really the most important thing, first of all, there's not much.
The only one that was completely kind of out there is fluke.
That's different. But otherwise these are, it's more about how formal they are and the level, right?
more some are more high level some are more basic so exactly so lean start to experiment experiment with the high level ones right start to insert that in your conversations at work listen for them now that you know them so michelle let's get started with that plan by doing a role play so we're going over
a recent report that we that i guess our company sent out is that right it?
Yes. Okay. All right.
Go ahead. So I think it all looked good.
Uh -oh. What? I accidentally also sent this to Horace.
Oh, that's not good.
I know. Oh, gosh. It was a mistake.
I'm sorry. It's okay.
We can fix this. You didn't mean to do it.
No, it was completely unintentional.
I know. I know. Okay.
Damage control. Yes, I'll just call him.
He's a little unhappy with me, though, because I inadvertently insulted him when I said I don't think our presentations have been as strong recently.
He took it too personally.
We can figure this out.
Oh, so maybe the report was like about Horace or something.
Yeah, I don't know.
For some reason, he wasn't supposed to see it, right?
He wasn't supposed to see it.
It was Horace should not have gotten that.
It's probably probably not a report about a person, but maybe maybe there's something in there that is not good for him to see for some reason.
So these things happen again, right?
These things happen at work sometimes.
So you said, I said, what happened?
And you said, I accidentally also sent, sent this to Horace.
And then I said, Oh gosh, it was a mistake.
And then I said, it's okay, we can fix this.
You didn't mean to do it.
Right. So I'm making you feel better.
You know, it's unintentional and then you said yeah i said it was completely unintentional yeah good and then you said yeah i'll just call him he's a little unhappy with me though because i inadvertently insulted him when i said when i said something so you're calling back to another time when things
are not going well with you and horace yeah horace and i need maybe a mediator maybe we need to have we need to go get a cup of coffee and kind of clear the air that's my recommendation yeah if you feel like there's some weirdness between you and a colleague just try to go directly at it in a way right you
know before it gets worse right yep and then um i just wanted to highlight one bonus which i think we'll do uh another episode on it was damage control yes exactly and i'm again i'm kind of making you feel better i think we're gonna we're gonna fix this we're gonna do certain things to mediate the damage.
Yes, exactly. Oh my gosh, this was fun.
So guys, another episode you should check out.
We did, um, a few episodes ago was three 76 in limbo at work, how to get through it.
And that was another great listener question.
I love it. So Michelle, what's our takeaway for today?
I mean, accidents happen, you know, whether it's kids spilling milk at home or whether it's someone sending a report to the wrong person reply, all right.
Accidentally replying all or texting the wrong person oh yeah it happened scary oh yeah i think i did that a few years ago i said something like oh something about chicken i texted something about chicken to someone that i wasn't didn't even have plans to hang out with it's like i'll have the chicken it
was funny that's funny that's what you hope for with these scenarios but sometimes it can be bad and now our listeners have words to kind of backtrack.
But I think the key is when you've made a mistake like this, reach out to the person, establish the lines of connection and do the damage control, right?
Damage control. All right.
Well, look out for that episode.
Hit follow. And thanks so much to Victor for this question.
This was a lot of fun.
All right. Talk soon, Michelle.
Bye. All right, bye.
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