Learn the English Phrases BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION and THE FINAL STRETCH

In this English lesson,

I wanted to help you learn the English phrase,

"by any stretch of the imagination."

Now, your imagination is when you use your mind

to think about things, to imagine things.

When you say something in the negative,

and then you add the phrase,

by any stretch of the imagination,

you're just emphasizing the point.

I better give some examples.

Let's say there's a team that's not very good at soccer.

They're not a very good football team.

You could say they are not a good team

by any stretch of the imagination.

So no matter how you think about that team,

they are a bad team.

So we used this phrase to emphasize that.

I used it I think in the other day

where I said, I'm not rich by any stretch of imagination.

This simply means that I am not someone

that has lots of money in the bank.

So in order to emphasize that,

I add the phrase, by any stretch of the imagination.

I'll use this phrase at the end of this video,

or when I reply to the comment too, you'll see.

The other phrase I wanted to teach you today

is the phrase, "the final stretch."

Whenever you do something and you only have a few days

or weeks or months left,

when you're at the, kind of close to the end,

you might say that you're in the final stretch.

Right now at school,

we have about two and a half months left,

so the school year is about 10 months long.

I feel like we're in the final stretch right now.

We're in the last part of the school year.

Just a few more weeks, pretty soon it'll be May,

and then it'll be June, and before you know it,

the students will be writing exams

and the school year will be over,

so I feel like we're in the final stretch.

So to review, when you use the phrase,

by any stretch of the imagination,

it's used to emphasize a negative point.

That's not a very nice car

by any stretch of the imagination.

You would be emphasizing that it's not a nice car.

And when you say that you are in the final stretch

of something, it means that you're in the last part.

When I get close to the four-minute mark

when I'm making these lessons,

I'm in the final stretch of the lesson.

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

This comment is from Parkash.

Nice weather and nice video too.

And my reply was it was a beautiful day.

Not like today.

Today, the weather is miserable.

So I would say that it's not a nice day

by any stretch of the imagination.

That was the part where I was going to use that phrase.

Right now, it's kind of strange out here.

It is warm, but it's really, really windy.

I'm not sure if you can see it.

I actually, I think it's calmed down a bit

since I started making the video,

but this tree was just moving

in the wind like crazy earlier.

And it's spitting rain a little bit.

The ground is sopping wet.

I don't know if I've ever used that phrase before.

When you say the ground is sopping wet,

it means it's rained a lot.

I am wearing my rubber boots again

because the ground is sopping wet today.

It's certainly a miserable day out here,

not the nicest day in the world,

but still, not a bad day to make a video

compared to way back in January when it was snowy

and lots of wind and freezing cold and my hands would,

it would feel like my hands were freezing off.

But anyways, what was I going to talk about today?

I was going to talk about how it might be a little early

to say we're in the final stretch.

I think I have this desire for the school year to end.

And I should probably relax a little bit

because it's really, I guess it's just the beginning

of the final stretch, but we do still have a ways to go.

If you think about it, it's the middle of April

and school goes until the middle of June,

so it is more like eight weeks, maybe nine weeks,

because we have graduation at the end as well,

but one thing I'm really happy about at school is,

things have become a lot more normal.

We have students who are playing on teams.

We have a badminton team and a soccer team

and sports are allowed now,

so that's really, really cool.

Anyways, thanks watching this little lesson.

I hope that you enjoyed it

and I will see you in a few days with another one.

Bye.