Learn the English Phrases "a piece of my mind" and "in one piece"

In this English lesson,

I wanted to help you learn the English phrase

"a piece of my mind."

Now, we usually use this phrase

with the verb to give

and I could say,

"I'm going to give someone a piece of my mind."

That means I'm angry with them

and I'm going to tell them exactly what I think.

If you were angry with your boss at work, you could say,

"Tomorrow I'm going to give my boss

a piece of my mind."

I'm going to tell him or her exactly

what I don't like about my job

or exactly what I don't like about

how things are going.

I'm going to give them a piece of my mind.

So again, it means you're angry, it means you're upset

and you're going to tell someone exactly how you feel.

The other phrase I wanted to teach you today is the phrase

"in one piece."

Now, this is kind of a weird phrase.

"We just had a storm here,

but we made it through in one piece."

"The other day I heard on the news

that someone had a car accident,

but they made it through in one piece."

So what I mean by it being a weird phrase is

it kind of sounds weird

if you think about the alternative.

We don't think about that

when we use it in English, though.

We use it to mean when something bad has happened

and we are still feeling good

and no one was hurt.

"So we had a bad snowstorm,

but Jen and I made it through in one piece."

The alternative, I'm not gonna talk about the alternative.

We made it through in one piece.

And again, when we use this in English

we aren't thinking about something gruesome.

We're just saying that everything is okay.

So to review, "a piece of my mind",

if I was to give you a piece of my mind

I would tell you exactly

what I think about something

and I might even be angry while I'm doing it.

And when you make it through something in one piece,

it means that everything went well

and everyone is doing okay.

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

This comment is from Judit.

"Nowadays, I drink a cup of hot chocolate every day.

I love it too.

Snowstorm?

Wow, I hope you and Brent will survive."

And then I said,

"We all made it through intact."

And when I replied to this comment, Judit

that's when I thought of the phrase in one piece.

We all made it through intact.

We all made it through in one piece.

Let's have a look around though.

You might be surprised to know

that we went through what they were calling a blizzard,

but we don't actually have

that much snow on the ground.

The snow was everywhere.

You couldn't see across the river,

you couldn't even see across the road.

I went out to check our mailbox that day

and there was so much snow blowing

I couldn't see in either direction.

So I actually decided to just not cross the road.

It was far too dangerous.

But if you look, you'll see

that you can still see little blades

of grass sticking up.

You can see that we did get snow,

my camera,

my camera doesn't like the cold.

We did get snow, but not an outrageous amount.

Let's spin this way a bit

so you can see the farm yard a bit better.

So you can see my tracks,

you can see the grass,

you can see the peonies still sticking up,

the little stubble from the peonies.

If you look in the distance

you can see an ominous sky, though,

the sun above,

but this very very dark cloud.

It's not coming this way.

When I looked on the radar this morning

that storm is actually moving that way,

so it's not coming here.

But yep, we had two days of really really bad weather

the day before,

so it was the 23rd and the 24th, yes.

Our power went out.

We ran the generator for a bit,

so we were all safe and sound.

We made it through in one piece.

We made it through intact.

But my brother who lives further south of me

actually had it worse.

Their electricity was out for 48 hours,

almost two days straight,

and it snowed there the entire time.

Whereas here, it eventually stopped snowing a little bit

and it wasn't too bad.

Let me check my time here.

I still can't see it.

It's very, oh, I went overtime, didn't I?

Oh, well, sometimes I talk too long

and that's just the way it goes.

Anyways, it's a beautiful day.

I'm off to dinner at my siblings,

with my siblings at my sister's house today.

That should be fun

and I'll see you in a couple days

with another short English lesson.

Bye.