Learn the English Phrases "to cry wolf" and "to wolf down"

In this English lesson, I wanted to help

you learn the English phrase to cry wolf.

Now, this phrase comes from a fable, a story

from long ago, about a boy who kept yelling

that there was a wolf attacking his sheep.

And then the villagers would come and help

him and there would be no wolf.

And he did it two or three times.

And then eventually when he yelled wolf,

nobody came because no one believed him.

So we now use this phrase in English

to talk about someone who says something bad

is happening when it's not happening.

If someone ran up to your house and said, there's a

fire in my house, and you went to help them, and

then when you got there, there was no fire, and for

some reason they just laughed about it because they tricked you,

you would say that they were crying wolf.

So it's simply a phrase that means someone

for some reason, is saying something bad is

happening and it's not actually happening.

The second phrase I wanted to

teach you is to wolf down.

Now, I might have taught this phrase before, but

to wolf down means to eat really, really quickly.

Teenagers tend to wolf down their food.

When I was a teenager, if I sat down to eat some

hot dogs, I would eat three or four hot dogs really quickly.

I would wolf down my food.

Basically, it means I would eat as if I was a wolf.

I guess if you were to watch a

wolf eat, they eat really, really quickly.

So to review, to cry wolf means to say

something is happening when it's not actually happening.

I can't think of other good examples, but

definitely the story of the boy with his

sheep and him yelling wolf and the villagers

coming to help and then there's no wolf.

That would be a great example.

And that is where the phrase comes from.

And to wolf down simply means to

eat your food really, really quickly.

Sometimes when I'm hungry, I still wolf down

my food, but it's always best to, to

chew everything carefully before you swallow it.

Wolfing down your food isn't very healthy.

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

This comment is from Aerosmith77.

Thanks for the phrases.

Will you ever appear in Jen's videos longer

than a few seconds? And my response? Yes, for sure.

But at this point it's mostly

her because I'm still at work.

I'm sure I'll be in here

and there throughout the summer.

So, yeah, that was a comment related to,

there was a video the other day on

Jen's YouTube channel where I briefly appeared driving

my tractor and dumping some compost.

So yeah, when the summer comes I'll have a

little more time to help Jen on the farm,

of course, and to do more work with her.

And then I'll show up in her

videos just a little bit more.

And for those of you that don't

know, Jen has a YouTube channel.

I'll put a link in the description below

and you can have a look at it. So.

But anyways, yeah.

How are things going here on the farm? Pretty good.

It's been a little bit wet.

We're mostly planting flowers.

We aren't harvesting a lot of flowers yet, but

you can see things like where there were daffodils.

There are no longer daffodils because we harvested

some of the blooms and sold them.

There are some really pretty flowers over here, though.

I'll show you.

I'm not sure what these are called.

These are really nice. I know,

we'll be picking a few of these.

We have some of these out in the bigger field as well.

So we'll be harvesting some of those and then some

of our later daffodils over here look pretty nice.

We just have small patches of daffodils.

We don't grow huge quantities of them.

They're not a great flower to sell.

These are a little bit, we would say

these are done like they're past their prime.

There's another good English phrase for you.

There's a few over here as well.

Although the alium are coming along nicely.

They're pretty fun.

Let me give you a better look at those.

Anyways, that's it for today.

I hope you were able to learn a few English phrases.

Past their prime.

There's another good one for you. Thanks for watching.

I'll see you next week

with another short English lesson. Bye.