Learn English for Golf: Vocabulary, Phrases, Culture

Hey, and welcome back to engVid. Today we're going to be talking about the great and wonderful

game of golf. Now, it has been said that golf is a good walk ruined, but I'm going to be

showing you what a wonderfully intricate game it is, and it's also a very important opportunity

that some people take to make business deals whilst engaged in doing something kind of

enjoyable and outside, and actually a lot of important conversations and negotiations

take place over a game of golf. So, let's understand this game. Now, to be able to have

a game of golf in the first place, you need someone to play with. You can play on your

own, but you're not going to have an amazing conversation, and you're also going to need

to practice so that when you do play golf, you're not spending your whole time in the

bush, but that's another story.

So, get yourself a golf buddy. What could you say? Well, you could say, "Hey, I was

wondering if you fancied a round of golf on Tuesday?" So, a "round of" means a game of,

like, one go round of the golf course. Another way of phrasing this, we could have, "What

about a round of golf on Tuesday?" The other guy, the other girl is all over it. They want

to play. You've got yourself a game. Fantastic. Put your bag in the car. Put your golf clothes

on. What do I wear? Put golf boots in the bag. Everything, driving there, driving there.

Ah, there's my girlfriend in the car park. We need to have some small talk. We need to

have a little bit of a chat before we play. It's not just "bag out", "game", "hit", "ball".

Of course not. It's a social occasion.

"Hey, Roger. Lovely to see you. How are you?" "I haven't seen you since. When was the last

time you saw your friend?" "Everything okay at home? How's...?" Ask after a particular

family member.

Small talk over, we're kind of getting our equipment ready. We're kind of walking over

to the tee. I should write that down for you. "Tee". You tee off. That means you hit the

ball from... It's the kind of the... The square bit of grass, the beginning bit of the...

Of the hole. Okay? So, we're talking about the rules. We're agreeing how we're going

to play.

Now, you might say something like, "What do you play off these days?" Now, this is a difficult

idea. It's related to something called a "handicap". So, "handicap" basically means how good you

are. Now, in a full game of golf, there are 18 holes. Let's explore what this idea of

a hole is. We have the place you start from, and you have to hit it to... This is called

a "green". Okay? "Green". Okay? This is the tee, this is the green. Okay? Now, it's all

done on how many shots it takes you to get from here down the hole. Okay? So, there will

be an expectation of how many shots it takes to complete each hole. Typically, three or

four shots to do a hole. And a "handicap" is about your sort of average... How many

shots does it normally take you to complete a round of golf? That's a simplification.

So, this question here, agreeing the rules, you're trying to find out how good are they.

Are we about the same? So, there are different ways of playing based on whether you are the

same ability as that person or whether there is a difference. If the person is the same

ability, you might agree to do "stroke play", which is... Will be the total number of shots

it takes you to go from here to here on all 18 holes. It's quite a sort of competitive,

it's lots of sort of writing down the numbers after each hole, so it's a bit serious, that.

Match play, perhaps more fun. So, after each hole, you go... Well, who won that hole? Brian

won that, so Brian is... Where shall I write this? He is one up. Okay? That means he is

winning by one kind of bit. Okay? Stable foot, that's another complicated system, but basically

for each hole, you get some points based on how well you did in that particular hole.

So, maybe you got a 2 and you would get, like, 3 points for that hole.

You can play golf with a group of four people, foursomes, and now there are different ways

of doing this. So, you've got two teams of two, you could just take it in turns. Brian

takes first shot, then Philip, Susan goes first, and then Samantha. Okay? So, you're

only using two balls. But the most fun bit in golf is teeing off, because that's when

you get to use the big, fat club and go... Bang. Okay? And hit it as hard as you can.

So, everyone wants to do that bit, so you could do best off the tee. So, you've got

two teams of two, each one of them hits the ball, and whoever has hit the best shot, you're

going to use that ball, and you pick the other one up and put it in your pocket. Okay?

So, we're now going to look at some technical golf jargon, technical words like "bogey".

Right, let's learn some more about golf. By the way, if you're enjoying this video and

learning something, I'd just like you to press "subscribe" right now. You're probably one

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Okay, so in golf, the hole is classified as a par 3, a par 4, or a par 5. This means how

many shots should it take to complete the hole? Now, if the hole, from beginning to

end, from tee to hole, is less than 225 yards, then technically you should be completing

the hole in three shots. If it's a par 4, it's a slightly longer hole; a par 5, longer

too.

Now, we have these five terms here to describe whether you got the recommended number of

shots, a few more, a few less. I'm missing one here, so I'm just going to grab my pen.

There I am. We need one in here. "Par". "Par" for the course. Now, there's various different

sort of phrasal verbs and idioms to do with "par", but "par" means normal. Okay? So that

means a par 3, you did it in three shots, it was fine. Actually, getting a par is really

good. Now, if you do really well, then you get a birdie. So, for a little short hole,

that's doing it in two shots. Okay? So you're getting one under the recommendation. If you

get it in two shots under the recommendation, then that is an eagle. Eagles are very, very

rare. Can you guess what an albatross is? That's right, it's even better than that.

It's three below the recommended number of shots for a hole. Like, it's quite extraordinary.

For like a really, really long one, you do your big drive, it goes, I don't know, 250

yards, and then you've got another long shot to go to the green, and you get that shot

and it goes down into the hole. Okay? Albatross, quite exceptional.

If things don't go quite so well, might be talking about some bogeys. Okay? Bogey is

when you get one over the par for the hole, and a double bogey is two over the par for

that particular hole. Now, lots to learn. I know there's a lot to absorb, but luckily

we're going to create an amazing, fun quiz for you to do after the video, so that we'll

just be checking that you're remembering these things. Okay?

Types of clubs. Now, golf actually originated in Scotland, where they just sort of had like

some old bits of wood, so the term for the club "wood" comes from... Comes from that.

These days they're more likely to be made from metal, titanium or some kind of graphite.

So the woods are the big, chunky things to really hit the ball a long way. Okay? For

these longer holes.

The irons, the clubface is like this, and it's to do with different angles to do with

how far you want to hit the ball. So if you want to hit it a really long way, then trying

to work out how this is going to be easy for you to see it... So you want less of an angle,

so you want like it... Like that. So if you go like that, bang, it's just going to go

a really long way. Whereas if you kind of angle it, then it's going to go sort of more

up in the air. Okay? So three iron, it's very flat, and it's... Whereas right down here,

the nine iron, you're looking at about a 50 degree angle to make the ball go up, and not

quite so far.

We also have wedges. A pitching wedge, go whoop, boom, or a sand wedge. Not a sandwich,

a sand wedge. Because sometimes to make it more difficult... Yeah? We're trying to get

there, and we're all the way down here. The person planning the course knows that we want

to go here, and they're going to put some bunkers. That means places for sand. So to

get out of the bunkers, we use a sand wedge because it's really low, and you've got to

get up over the edge of the bunker.

Right. Etiquette. Golf is one of those things where there are lots of rules and regulations,

and I'm not going to bore you with all of them, but just give you some general guidelines.

Most courses, although I have played with my wife once wearing high heels, you're kind

of meant to look sort of smart casual is probably what I'd say. So, a pair of chinos, some golf

shoes with spikes, yeah, with the metal bits that go into the ground, and a collar with

a shirt. Okay? Don't turn up in sort of jeans with loads of holes in and sort of chains

and that kind of look. It's quite sort of traditional and old-fashioned.

Best to sort of leave your phone on silent or leave it in the car. It's not the kind

of place where you're like, "Hello, Bill. What's going on?" No, no, no. We don't want

phones on the course.

A divot. A divot is where you go up and you dig a hole accidentally kind of in the ground.

Kind of happens naturally, but sometimes you take a little bit too much of the earth out,

and then you have to be a gardener and you have to get your divot, put it back into the

ground. Okay? So when you go digging, repair. Can be very annoying, golf, when it goes wrong,

but instead of getting your club and going... And blaspheming and swearing, you've got to

take it. You've got to go... Okay? And you've got to move on and be good-natured about it.

Here to stand. So, you're playing with someone else. Yep. They're about to take their shot.

Where do you think would be a dangerous place to stand? Yeah, sort of about there. Sorry

about that. Okay? So, you always want to make sure that the person hitting the ball can

see you, and really they should be sort of behind you rather than in front.

Which brings me on to this very useful phrase here. If you hit the ball and there's someone

maybe on a different hole over there, and your shot is suddenly kind of going in the

wrong direction and it looks like it's going to land on the lady captain's head, you shout

"Four!" Okay? And what "four" means, it's an abbreviation for "before". It means you

there, before, or in front of me, there's a ball that's going to hit your head. Move.

Okay? So we say "four". Great shots and bad luck.

This is the first stanza of a poem called "Seaside Gulf" by John Betjeman. The poet

was not an especially good golfer, but he enjoyed playing in a beautiful part of England

called Cornwall, which is... And this particular course was near the Atlantic Ocean, hence

Seaside Gulf. This is all about a remarkable hole where for once everything went right,

and he was really happy. Okay? So it's talking about his tee shot, his first shot. Okay?

When he's used the wood, it probably was a wood that he used.

How straight it flew. Yeah? The ball is flying through the sky. How long it flew. Okay? You

know, when it's a good sort of 200 yards. It cleared, that means it went over the rutty

track. Okay? "Rutty" meaning sort of bumpy. And soaring, so we think of a bird going...

It disappeared from view. Yeah, he can't even see it anymore it's gone so far. "Beyond the

bunker's back". Okay? It's even gone over that... That sand pit, the bunker. And now

we have some adjectives. "A glorious, sailing, bounding drive". Okay? Look how positive this

vocabulary is to describe this amazing shot that made me glad I was alive. And there we

have our double rhyme at the end of the stanza.

Now, I'm going to be continuing to go through this poem, "Seaside Gulf", in my lesson on

how to learn a poem. So, check out that video after you've watched this, and if you do want

any other help with your English, you can check out my website, honeyourenglish.com.

I quite like this title, Hone Your English, because it's also honey, ourenglish.com. Panic.

Help. We need help. Okay. You might not need help. If not, just carry on watching my videos,

and I'll see you in the next one.