Learn the English Terms "an unwritten rule" and "a hard-and-fast rule"

In this English lesson I wanted to help you learn the English phrase an unwritten rule.

Now, this is exactly what it sounds like.

It's a rule, but it's not written down anywhere.

There are a lot of unwritten rules when you are speaking English,

because sometimes when you're in an English speaking country,

not just the language is different, but the culture is a little bit different.

And not everyone writes down those rules.

A great example would be the questions that were in my lesson from yesterday

on my bigger channel.

There are certain questions

that you just don't ask when you're having a conversation in English.

But there's nowhere to go to find that rule, it's not written down any where.

It's just an unwritten rule.

It's a rule that we have all agreed to, but no one's

actually written them down in a rule book.

It's not actually the law.

It's just an unwritten rule.

The other phrase I want to teach you today is a hard-and-fast rule.

Now, a hard-and-fast rule is a rule.

It is written down.

And if you break the rule, there are consequences.

Consequences are what happens after you break a rule.

Let's say at your job there is a hard and fast rule that you do not...

Let me see...

Trying to think of... That you do not.

I'm drawing a blank here.

Let me come up with a different example.

Let's say at the movie theater, there's a hard-and-fast rule

that you can't chew gum in the movie theater.

That means because it's a hard-and-fast rule, if you're caught,

they'll kick you out of the movie theater.

Like, there are immediate consequences if you break that rule.

So to review an unwritten rule is a rule that everyone kind of knows about,

but it's not written down anywhere, someone has to tell you about it.

And a hard-and-fast rule is a rule where if you break that rule, you will..

you can expect consequences immediately.

But hey, let's look at a comment from a previous video.

This comment is from Vítor

and Vítor says, Hello, Bob.

It is interesting how we can come up with new ideas nowadays.

If one day you run out of ideas

or topics for your lessons, you can try crowdsourcing or even A.I..

With crowdsourcing,

you can ask your viewers for new ideas or topics they think are gripping for people.

In another case, you can try something like ChatGPT or another AI.

I do not know if that technology is able to do such a thing, but you can give it a try someday.

In the future I think we are going to have a smorgasbord of technology doing things for us.

By the way, thank you.

And my response? I will keep that in mind.

Right now I am around so many people, I just listen for interesting words and phrases.

Maybe when I'm older and around less people I'll need some other tools.

So yes, AI is becoming quite cool I think.

I was playing around with it

the other day in one of my classes and my students and I really enjoyed using it.

It was kind of fun to play around with it.

We even talked a little bit about what would be good jobs

to do in the future, jobs that AI couldn't do.

And we decided that teaching is

probably one of those jobs, although I wasn't sure I agreed with them.

But they said that during the pandemic, online learning wasn't fun,

and they think for the next ten or 20 years, people will actually prefer

to have actual teachers, human teachers in their classrooms

doing the teachings, doing the teaching, not teachings the teaching.

And I think they might be right.

I think the pandemic and remote learning gave us this little view

of online learning or remote learning, and a lot of people didn't like it.

So anyways, I decided to take you today

to a more modest part of my town.

So in this part of my town, the houses are more reasonably priced.

This is actually similar to where my Mom used to live.

These houses are usually quite reasonable if you wanted to purchase one.

Anyways, time's up. I should go.

Thanks for watching this lesson and I'll see you in a couple of days with another one. Bye.