Learn The English Phrases TO DUMB DOWN and DUMB LUCK

In this English lesson,

I wanted to help you learn the English phrase to dumb down.

Now I think you know what the word dumb means.

It's kind of an insult for someone who's not very smart.

If you say he's dumb,

you're saying that that person isn't intelligent.

So it's not a nice thing to say.

But we do use the phrase to dumb down

to talk about making something simpler,

and easier to understand.

Think about it this way.

Sometimes you read a book, and it's a really good book,

and it's very complex, and a little bit hard to understand,

and then they make it into a movie,

and then they dumb down the story a little bit,

so it's easier for people to understand.

Sometimes too they'll make instructions for something,

and the instructions might be really hard to understand.

So they might say to someone at that company,

hey, before we ship that product,

someone needs to dumb down the instructions.

You need to make them simpler, and easier to understand.

The other phrase I wanted to teach you today

is the phrase dumb luck.

So luck, when you're lucky,

it's just means that something goes your way for no reason.

And dumb luck is the same thing basically.

A good example would be this.

Normally I take a certain road to go to work,

but the other day I took a different road,

and then I ended up finding out the road I normally take,

there was an accident there, and I would've been stuck.

So it was just dumb luck that I took the right road.

There was no reason when I got to the end of my driveway,

I decided to go one way and not the other.

It ended up being dumb luck

that I just ended up going the way

where there was no traffic,

and no accident that would have held me up.

So to review, when you dumb down something,

when you are going to dumb something down,

it means you're going to make it simpler,

and easier to understand.

And when you have dumb luck,

it just means that things went your way for some reason,

usually just 'cause you got a little bit lucky.

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

This comment is from Gill.

Thanks, Bob, I like lilac.

In Russian, we call it a bush, not a tree.

Could you tell me what you call

the color of that cat of yours

in Canadian English, ginger or red?

My response, we also sometimes call it a bush,

lilac tree, lilac bush.

I think it depends on how tall it is.

Also, we would say it is an orange cat.

So yeah, technically the lilac trees

that I showed you in the last video,

technically I think they would be a lilac bush.

They look more like a bush than a tree,

but we've always called them lilac trees,

I think because they are taller than me.

And the cat, yeah,

we don't usually call a cat like that a ginger cat.

We would usually just say it's an orange cat.

And the other name we have for it is Tabby.

I think Tabby refers to

the pattern of the fur on the cat.

So I would've called that an orange Tabby cat.

Hey, an interesting thing is happening at work.

For some reason, we are trying to figure out

how we used to do all kinds of things in May and in June.

Last year in May and June, we were learning from home.

Two years ago in May and June, we were learning from home.

So there's all these little activities,

and things that we can do now that we can do in person.

And as a staff, as teachers,

we're trying to figure out how we used to do certain things.

I was in a meeting this morning

where a lot of people were saying,

well, how did we do it three years ago

the last time we did it?

Or how did we do it three years ago?

Who was in charge back then, and who organized it?

So I'm sure similar things are happening for you.

If you work at a school or at your place of business,

there are things that we're able to do now,

because COVID seems to be going slowly away.

I don't think it's totally gone yet.

And sometimes you end up sitting around asking each other,

well, how did we use to do it?

Who was in charge last time?

Did anyone take notes?

And thankfully, usually we do have notes on everything.

That's where the using computers is really awesome.

You can go back and find out how you did it the last time.

Anyways, thanks for watching.

See you in a couple days

with another short English lesson, bye.