Hello, English learners.
Welcome back to the Learn English podcast, the podcast that teaches English in context, so you can learn naturally.
On today's episode.
I want to talk about the holiday that we are going to have here in the United States this Thursday.
It is going to be Thanksgiving.
On today's episode, I want to talk about the vocabulary that you will hear with Thanksgiving.
That way, if you talk to someone from the United States, or if you are in the United States and going to go to a Thanksgiving dinner, you will have the vocabulary you need to have a conversation about this holiday.
So if you're interested in learning more about these Thanksgiving specific words well, of course, practicing your listening comprehension then follow along, because we're about to begin.
Before we get started, I want to remind you to look at the description of this podcast episode.
There you will find a list of the words and phrases that I used in the episode, so you can take them, study them and build your English vocabulary.
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Now let's talk about some Thanksgiving vocabulary.
In the past few years, I've done a couple of episodes on Thanksgiving.
I did a Thanksgiving food episode and a Thanksgiving traditions episode.
I will leave links to those.
I would recommend listening to those episodes if you have not.
But we're going to continue with this series and continue to build on these vocabulary terms.
In the Thanksgiving food episode I talked about what foods are very common for people to eat at Thanksgiving and I mentioned that the Thanksgiving meal is really the key part of the holiday.
Thanksgiving is known as a day to eat food.
I know a lot of families do Thanksgiving dinner, but some also do a Thanksgiving lunch.
My family, we tend to do a Thanksgiving lunch because we're hungry.
We want to eat the food as early as possible.
A lot of people do Thanksgiving dinner, but just having that meal with family is a really or part of the holiday.
It is the most important thing when it comes to Thanksgiving.
When you are the person who is having the meal at your house, you are the host.
So the host is the person who is having the Thanksgiving meal at their house.
They are the ones usually who are doing the most cooking and preparing most of the meal.
I know that my mom is the one who always hosts Thanksgiving dinner for my family.
I am not the host.
I am a guest.
So if you are not the person who's hosting, if you're not one of the family members that lives in that house that is hosting Thanksgiving dinner, if you're going to someone else's house, you are a guest.
You are a guest for the Thanksgiving meal.
Now you might hear someone say that they're hosting Thanksgiving dinner.
That sometimes sounds a little bit formal.
I wouldn't say that it's extremely common to hear.
Instead, you might hear people say that they are having Thanksgiving dinner.
And I know that sounds like the act of eating.
But if you listen to the context where someone says it, I think you'll be able to understand the meaning.
So, for example, let's say you're talking to a co-worker and you're asking what their plans are for Thanksgiving.
They might say that they are having Thanksgiving dinner at their mother's house, like I am.
That means that the person's mother is the one who's hosting.
So they're using that have word to kind of differentiate and tell you who the person is that is the host.
So we're having Thanksgiving dinner at my mother's.
That means that my mother is the person who is hosting and I am going to be the guest.
Now, if I say we're having Thanksgiving dinner at my house this year, that means that I am hosting, and whoever I am inviting are going to be my guests.
So if I tell you that I'm having Thanksgiving dinner at my house, that means that I am hosting Thanksgiving.
Now you might hear this if someone invites you to Thanksgiving dinner or asks you if you don't have a place to go, to come and join them.
So if you are my coworker and I tell you hey, we're having Thanksgiving dinner at my house at six, do you want to come by?
You might not understand that because it's not textbook perfect English.
It's not the very formal English.
But what that means is that I am inviting you.
So if you ask someone to come by, that means you are inviting them to whatever location you are talking about.
So if I ask you to come by my place, what that means is come over to my house.
Or I'm asking you if you would like to come over to my house.
So if I ask you, hey, if you don't have any plans for Thanksgiving, do you want to come by my place?
That means if you don't already have a dinner or a place that you're going to for Thanksgiving, Would you like to come over to my house to have Thanksgiving dinner?
Now you can hear the difference there, right?
What I said is a lot more informal compared to the textbook perfect English that you would hear, especially if you learned English in school.
I know that I have a family friend who is from the Philippines and she actually taught English.
She majored in English in the Philippines.
She taught English in the Philippines.
So she has very, very good English, very high level. perfectly fluent in English.
But she said that when she came to the United States she was very confused because Americans do not talk like how people talk in textbooks.
We do not use that very formal English.
I am never going to ask someone would you like to come over to my house to have Thanksgiving dinner?
That sounds very robotic.
And if I know someone well enough where I am inviting them over to my house, I'm going to be more informal because I have a good relationship with that person.
I'm obviously inviting them to my house.
So I'm friends with them.
And if I'm friends with someone, I'm not going to use very formal terms.
I'm going to use things like, do you want to come by instead of would you like to come over?
And I'm going to say my place instead of my house.
So just practicing and listening to native English speakers will really help you develop that ear for understanding what someone is saying, which means developing your listening comprehension to understand what a native speaker is saying.
If you get invited over to someone's house, if you are going somewhere for dinner, you usually have to travel to whatever that location is.
And in the United States, we tend not to use a lot of public transportation.
A lot of people have cars here.
So when you are driving to someone's house, you're usually going to talk about traffic.
When you get to someone's house, they might ask you, how was traffic?
Which means, was it busy?
Were there a lot of other people on the road?
Did you get stuck in traffic?
That might have happened.
You might have gotten stuck in traffic and you can say that we got stuck in traffic on the drive over here.
Also, if you hear that if someone says oh, there was so much traffic, you know that they're saying that it took them a long time to get there.
I mentioned before that the host for this Thanksgiving meal usually is the person who is doing most of the cooking.
Sometimes there are people who host who really don't like to cook or don't cook and they might buy food means that they are getting it catered.
So catered means that you are having food at your house but you didn't make it usually a restaurant made it instead and you pick it up, you bring it to your house and then you serve it for the meal.
So if someone says that they're having a catered thanksgiving dinner, that means that they aren't cooking it themselves but they're getting the food from some other place.
I know i do have a family member who does not really cook And she tends to get things catered.
Her husband usually pays for catering instead.
So that is one option.
People do cook Thanksgiving dinner.
Sometimes they also get it catered.
And sometimes they'll also have a potluck.
A potluck means that people are bringing food with them when they go to the meal, when they go to the gathering at someone's house.
In that case, usually you discuss ahead of time what everyone is bringing, and then people bring that item with them.
That way you don't have just a ton of one food.
You don't want 50 bottles of soda and no actual food.
So usually you talk about that ahead of time.
When it is time for the Thanksgiving meal, usually the host will set the table.
Set the table means that they are putting out the food items and also the plates and cutlery.
Cutlery is the word for things like knives, forks, spoons, the utensils that you use to eat.
So if someone says that they need to set the table, or if they ask you to help them set the table, they're asking you to put out the plates, put out the cutlery, put out the things that people need so that they can eat the meal.
They might also have a centerpiece, which sometimes is a floral arrangement.
If you go to a wedding, for example, there's always flowers at the center of a table.
And that was a centerpiece.
In the United States, if you are not a vegetarian, then usually the turkey is the centerpiece.
The turkey is the main food that is associated with Thanksgiving.
It's a big bird.
It's a big item, around 15 pounds, which is about seven and a half kilos.
And that's usually why it is the centerpiece when you go to a Thanksgiving dinner.
Like I said, food is the thing that is associated with Thanksgiving.
Food is definitely number one.
I would say football is a close number two, and I'm talking about American football, the NFL here in the United States.
That is a close second, but food is definitely the number one thing.
So when you're eating, usually people have their meal, they have whatever food items, and then they also have a dessert.
I talked about the food items and the dessert again in that episode I did on Thanksgiving food.
If you want to hear specifics about the different types of food, I would recommend watching or listening to that episode.
Usually when People do have a Thanksgiving meal and have dessert and then kind of sit around and talk.
But a big part of Thanksgiving is going back for seconds.
Seconds means you take your plate and you get another portion of food.
You get another serving, especially of whatever food item you really like.
Thanksgiving dinner tends to be out for a number of hours when you have Thanksgiving dinner.
Usually the host will leave the food on the table and people are free to just go back and get more food.
It's very common to have seconds when you're having a Thanksgiving meal.
If you are someone who really likes Thanksgiving and you really really want to eat, and if you're at your host house for a number of hours, you might also get thirds, which is another serving, a third serving of food.
When people eat that much, they might say that they are stuffed.
Turkeys for Thanksgiving usually are stuffed, which means that you put some type of fruit or breadcrumb mix inside the opening inside the cavity of the turkey when you bake it.
So there is something called stuffing.
Again, I talked about it in the food episode, but you will also hear people say that they are stuffed.
What that means is that they are very full, that they've eaten a lot of food.
So if you've ever eaten so much that it's a You're not able to maybe move as freely as you want.
Maybe your stomach hurts a little bit because you've eaten so much food.
That is being stuffed.
So if you say that you feel like you have a lot of food in your stomach, your stomach feels very heavy you can say that I'm stuffed, which means I'm very, very full.
I probably ate too much.
You might also hear people say that they overate, which again is the same idea, that they just ate too much food.
If someone says that they overate Thanksgiving dinner, it means that they ate too much food at Thanksgiving dinner.
Some other words that they might also use is that they indulged.
So to indulge is to do something that you don't normally do and something that maybe is a little bit bad.
Maybe it's something that is very tempting to do, but you don't normally do it.
So, for example, eating a lot of food to the point where you are uncomfortable, that is an indulgence.
That is doing something that you don't normally do, but you do it for a special occasion and it's something that you enjoy doing something that you might like but you might regret after.
Someone also might say that they were gluttonous.
Gluttony usually is associated with eating a lot of food, with overindulging, overeating.
So if someone says that they felt gluttonous or they were gluttonous, that again is just another way of saying that they ate a lot of food.
Now with Turkey, there is an urban legend.
An urban legend is something that people tell each other that maybe isn't entirely true, but people say it like it is true, or it's something that's a commonly held belief, even though it might not be true.
With turkey, there is an urban legend that turkey makes you very sleepy.
There's an amino acid inside turkey that is called tryptophan.
And tryptophan is... a chemical that is known to cause sleepiness.
Now there have been actual studies that have shown that there isn't very much tryptophan in turkeys.
Not enough to make you fall asleep if you ate just some turkey meat.
But this is an urban legend.
This is something that people will say.
People will say that they had a lot of turkey and that it made them very sleepy.
It's probably not the tryptophan.
It's probably just eating too much food that makes someone tired, that makes someone sleepy.
You tend to feel very tired, very sedated after you eat a very large meal, because your body is trying to digest all that food.
That's probably what it is, but you might hear people talk about this idea of having tryptophan with their turkey, or the turkey being the cause of them feeling very tired and not relating it to actually overeating.
When people eat so much that they do feel sedated, when they do feel very tired afterwards, they might use the term food coma.
A coma is when you are not conscious.
And sometimes this is because you had an accident.
Maybe you're in the hospital and you might be in a coma, which means that the doctors, the nurses, cannot wake you up.
They can't get you to be conscious.
But we use this term in slang when we say food coma.
So in this case, it's not an accident.
It's not some type of medication that's making you sleep.
It is the food that's making you sleep.
Because you ate so much food, you are very tired.
You can't keep your eyes open.
You're very sleepy.
For that reason, people call this a food coma.
The state of feeling very tired after you eat too much food.
You might also hear people say look at their stomach and call it a food baby.
So a pregnant woman has a baby growing in their abdomen and they get a very big belly.
Their stomach increases in size.
People will use this comedically again if they eat too much food, if they feel like they have a lot of food in their stomach, they might make a joke about how they have a food baby, which means that it's not actually a real life baby.
It is the high amount of food that they ate that is in their stomach.
So their stomach is expanded and they feel like they have a baby.
They feel like they're pregnant.
So if you hear someone say this term food baby, that's what they're saying.
Again, that they have just so much food in their belly.
When you are at Thanksgiving dinner, you might also hear some words having to do with this whole idea of Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving means literally to give thanks for what you have, to be grateful for what you have in your life.
So people might actually go around the dinner table and say what they are thankful for or what they are grateful for.
You might hear this Maybe if you go to someone's house, the host will have everyone say what they are thankful for that year.
What is something good or something that they are grateful for in their life?
Sometimes people do this not everyone who does this but it is tied to that idea of Thanksgiving, of being grateful, of being thankful for what you have.
Another word that you might hear is blessings.
Blessings are things that you have in your life.
Usually people associate this with a religious context.
Blessings from God, which are things that God has given you in your life.
Good things that God has given you.
So I can say that my dog, for example, is something that I am grateful for.
I really love my dog.
She makes my life so much more joyful.
She brings so much joy into my life.
So I can say I am thankful for my dog.
I can also say that I'm blessed to have my dog and I could also say that my dog is a blessing in my life.
Those are all things that I could say that have this whole idea of being thankful for something, for something good in your life.
In this case, I'm talking about my dog.
When people are talking about their blessings, they might talk about them in a heartfelt manner.
Heartfelt means to talk with sincere emotion.
So you are not just saying that you're thankful for things or just saying oh, I'm thankful to be here.
I'm thankful for the year.
But really being honest, really being sincere and sharing something that is important to you.
So if you talk in a heartfelt manner, in a heartfelt way, that means you're talking with very sincere emotions and you're talking about things that are very true.
You're being very honest with whatever it is you're talking about.
So you might hear this with Thanksgiving, but you can also hear it in any other context.
When you are talking to anyone, you can say that they were being heartfelt with you, which means they're being very honest, having a very strong emotion, but a sincere emotion and being very honest.
And, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I want to say a heartfelt thank you to those of you who are listening.
When I started this podcast, I made it as a resource for my English students and I didn't know if anyone else was ever going to hear it.
So if you are a listener of this podcast, thank you so much.
Thank you for listening, for helping us continue to grow as a podcast, and I really hope that it has helped you with your English.
I want to remind you to look at the description of this podcast episode for the words and phrases that I used, so you can take them and continue to build your English vocabulary.
I really want this podcast to be a great resource for you, and that vocabulary list can really help you when you are trying to reach English fluency.
It's very important to build your vocabulary, so that's why I make those lists just to help you and support you while you are on your English journey.
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