Learn the English Phrases "to put your foot down" and "to put up a fight"

In this English lesson I wanted to help you learn the English phrase to put your foot down.

When you put your foot down, it means you're not going to agree with someone.

Let's say that my kids said that they wanted to have ice cream and I said no.

And then they asked again. And then I said no.

Eventually I would just put my foot down and say, Stop asking.

The answer will always be no.

So when you put your foot down, it means you're in charge of something or you're

the one that can make a decision and you're not going to change how you feel about it.

The second phrase I wanted to teach you today is the phrase to put up a fight.

When you put up a fight, it doesn't mean that you're actually, you know, punching and hitting.

It means that you're not going to give up on something.

When I tell my kids they can't have ice cream, they tend to put up a fight.

They keep asking. They don't want to give up.

They just keep asking me about it because they..., they

want to put up a fight.

They want to discuss it, they want to argue.

They want to try and make me change my mind.

So to review, when you put your foot down, it means you're saying no to something.

I guess it doesn't have to be “no”, it could be, yes.

But normally it's no you're saying no and you're not going to change your mind.

And when you put up a fight, it means you want to change

someone's mind and you're not willing to take no for an answer.

You're going to argue and want to discuss it until they change their mind.

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

This comment is from Irina. Hello, Bob.

Thank you so much for this video.

Usually I am full of energy without coffee and sugar.

The river and the fields in the background of the video always calm me down.

Oop! I'm somewhere else today.

And my response? Right now the river is full of geese.

There are probably over a thousand. Yes.

It's interesting right now because the river is super, super full of geese.

In fact, if you go to my other channel and look for my stories, I did a little video of them.

Maybe I'll see if I can do that here as well in the next video if they're still visiting.

But hey, I'm at school. It's nighttime.

One of my kids had a club that they had to go to, so they're playing basketball right now.

So I thought I would show you lockers and combination locks and one of the entrances.

And if you look behind me, you can even see a classroom.

This isn't my classroom, by the way.

My classroom is in a completely different part of the school that's closed right now.

But this is what a school looks like.

You can see the recycling bins behind me.

And if you look behind me, you can see the long, long hallway.

This is a pretty traditional school in Canada.

Our schools in Canada are usually hallways, lots of lockers.

Students can have an upper locker or a lower locker.

They prefer the upper locker.

They're required to keep their lockers shut, but sometimes they leave them open.

Hopefully there's nothing valuable in there.

Our newer classrooms have windows,

so it's just more of an open concept.

We've been building more and more.

When we build onto schools in Ontario, Canada, we often build rooms that have more windows.

So you can see what's going on.

Not all the teachers and students like that.

We've had windows in the doors to our classrooms for a very, very long time.

That's been pretty normal.

But in the last ten or 20 years, we've been adding more

and more windows to the walls just to give it more of an open feel.

Some students, though, would prefer it to be a little more closed in and a little more private,

especially if they're doing a presentation or something like that.

And if their friends walk by, they can see them.

Anyways. A couple last things.

A fire extinguisher, a little sign for the fire extinguisher.

And then, of course, the the thing you pull if there is a fire.

Anyways, just a short little tour of this corner of the school.

Hope you enjoyed it.

I'll see you in a couple of days with another short English lesson. Bye.