Hey everybody, welcome to another phrasal verb episode.
I hope you're all doing great and that your English learning is going well and that you're ready to learn another phrasal verb.
In this episode we're only going to look at one phrasal verb, which is back up, and that's because we're going to look at three different meanings of this phrasal verb.
This is very common in English.
Many phrasal verbs have multiple meanings.
And we're going to look at three different usages of the phrasal verb backup.
So the first meaning of backup is to give support to someone or something in order to Help it, defend it or show it to be true.
Okay.
So for example, I could say she backed him up when he confronted the manager about the problem.
So in this case I'm saying that he was going to go talk to the manager about this problem that they had with the manager and she went with him to support what he was saying, or defend him or say that this other coworker was saying was true, or something like that.
Or I could say he backed up his argument with some very interesting evidence.
So what I'm saying here is that he supported his argument, showed that it was true, because of that evidence that he had.
So he backed up his argument.
And the next meaning of backup is to make a copy of some digital information in case the original is lost.
So for example, I could say, I always backup all my documents just in case.
What I'm saying here is that I always make a copy of all of my documents somewhere else, just in case the originals are lost.
And then one other meaning of back up is to go in reverse.
And this could be in a car.
You can back up in a car.
It could also be just walking.
I could say, oh, can you back up a couple steps?
I'm saying, can you move backwards a couple steps?
Or in your conversation, I could say, hold on, let's back up a minute.
Why did you say that?
It's like, let's go in reverse and address that point that you just made.
Okay.
So, those are three different meanings of backup.
And now I'm going to talk about a couple different things, and I'm going to use this phrasal verb now, again and again, so that you can hear it repeated in different sentences.
And then by the end of this episode, you should feel more comfortable understanding and maybe even using the phrasal verb back up.
Okay, so first let's talk about diets, ways of eating.
I always have to preface this when I talk about diets.
When you preface something.
This means that you say something before you start talking about the thing you want to talk about.
I always have to preface this topic with an explanation of the word diet, because non-native English speakers often have an issue understanding the meaning of this word in English, because diet doesn't only mean that you are restricting your food for a short period of time to lose weight.
That's one definition of diet.
However, we also use the word diet in English to just talk about your way of eating, okay?
Okay, so for example, we say the standard American diet.
We're just talking about the standard food that Americans eat every day.
So in this context, I'm using the word diet to talk about a way of eating like this is your lifestyle.
So, the really frustrating thing about this topic is that nobody agrees.
And what's even more frustrating is that everyone has studies and evidence to back up their position, whatever their position is.
They might follow a certain type of diet, and that's because they've found evidence that backs up this position, this diet, this way of eating.
And so they think that this is the correct way to eat because of all of the evidence backing it up.
And other people will have that same thing, but with a different type of diet, and they find all the evidence that supports that other diet, that backs up that other way of eating that they prefer.
So nobody agrees on nutrition and diets and everyone will show you the evidence to back up their claims about that diet.
And it all sounds convincing, right.
When you hear people talk about their different diets, their ways of eating, and they show you the studies that have been done that prove that their diet is the best, and these studies seem to back up everything that the person is saying.
And it's kind of hard not to be convinced because they have all the evidence to back up what they're saying.
And people will often use their own testimony, their own experience, to back up their claims about this diet.
They might tell you all about their past and how unhealthy they were and how they fixed all their problems by changing their way of eating.
And their testimony really backs up their ideas about eating because it looks like it has worked for them right.
And so when you're in conversations with people, when you're talking about this, you can really hear some amazing testimonies and people might show you all of their personal evidence to back up what they're saying.
And Sometimes I have to say something like let's back up here.
You're saying that you only eat blah blah blah, because of course, some people have a very extreme type of diet and they only eat a very small number of foods or whatever, and you almost can't believe what their diet is.
You ask them to verify that you heard correctly.
And you might say this phrase, hold on, back up a second.
You only eat these three foods or whatever.
Back up a second.
You're saying that you lost 120 pounds by following this diet.
That's something that you might encounter.
People might have really amazing testimonies, amazing stories about how their diet has changed their life.
And it's almost hard to believe that they're telling the truth.
That's why you ask them to back up and explain things a little bit more, just to make sure you've understood everything correctly.
And if people didn't back up their claims with evidence and studies, it would be different, because then you could just say that everyone has their different preferences and and who knows what's best.
But when people back up what they're saying with study after study and testimony after testimony, it's hard to really negate all of that.
When you negate something, this means that you kind of make it ineffective, right?
You counter it and make it ineffective.
So it's hard to negate or deny all of that.
So the evidence that they bring forth to back up their arguments is really convincing, right?
And I think that when people show you different studies that have been done that support their diet, for example I honestly think that a lot of these studies can be misinterpreted.
Or maybe they weren't done very well, like they didn't focus on the things they should have focused on or honestly, I think that some of them are skewed.
When something is skewed, this means that it has problems. a bias.
Someone favors something, so maybe they skew the study to try to make it show what they want it to show.
So basically what I'm saying is not all of the evidence that people present to you to back up their argument is 100 legitimate.
But it can be hard to refute this, to deny this, especially if you don't know much about examining studies and seeing if they were done well or not.
So really, when people show you all of their evidence, even if it was skewed or misinterpreted, it usually sounds convincing, right.
So I think many of you would agree with me that this topic can be frustrating.
All right.
The other topic I wanted to talk about just briefly is the time when I was in film school.
This is a true story and I worked on various film projects and I stored these projects on an external hard drive so that hard drive contained my films that I was working on and I hadn't backed up those projects elsewhere, meaning anywhere else.
They weren't backed up anywhere else.
They were only on this one hard drive.
I had never thought of backing things up on a different hard drive.
That thought had never occurred to me until my hard drive died. meaning it broke down, so to say.
So I lost my film projects.
It was terrible.
That really caused me a lot of issues.
I didn't have my projects backed up anywhere else.
So you can imagine... how terrible that was, right?
I learned a very valuable lesson.
You need to back up your important documents.
Thankfully, nowadays, we have cloud services.
We have Drive like OneDrive or Google Drive, those different services where you can backup your important files there.
But of course, sometimes those things can be compromised.
So there are different options, but it's important to backup your important files somewhere, or else you're at risk of having a situation where, like I had, where your important files get lost because your hard drive crashed or your computer crashed or somehow you just lost the file right.
So I wish I had bought another hard drive and backed up my films onto the second hard drive, but at least at that time the hard drives that we bought for film school were expensive And I didn't think about buying another hard drive.
I thought one was enough and it was expensive enough.
So, of course, that meant that I didn't have my files backed up anywhere else.
And I lost them.
So I had to redo one of my projects, I think.
I can't remember all the details, but I just remember that I was really disappointed that I hadn't backed up my files somewhere else.
So you can take that as a lesson.
I already failed, so you can learn from my mistake and make sure that your important files are backed up in more than one place, right?
Okay hopefully, as I was talking, you were able to hear the phrasal verb back up many times in different sentences.
And hopefully now you can use it in your own sentences.
And, as always, I want to encourage you to use my advanced episodes, because in these episodes I'm speaking slowly.
This isn't how English normally sounds.
So eventually you need to practice with real English spoken fast.
That's what my advanced episodes are for to help you practice English with real English spoken fast.
And that's what my US Conversations podcast is for to allow you to practice with content in which two people are talking at normal speed.
So that resource will also be really helpful for you.
The links to sign up for both of those are in the description below this episode.
All right, thank you so much for listening to this phrasal verb episode and I'll talk to you in the next one.
