Talking about CLOTHES in English: Vocabulary about SHIRTS

Hey, everyone. I'm Alex. Thanks for clicking, and welcome to this lesson on

"Talking About Dress Shirts". So, here, I have a dress shirt.

It is being held up by my wonderful assistant,

Steve, the spider. Thank you very much for your help today, Steve. I'll take you out

to your favourite restaurant afterwards. And dress shirts are also known as button-up shirts.

So, today, what I would like to do is just go over some of the basic parts of a dress

shirt, as well as talking about some of the verbs that we associate with dress shirts,

and, well, lots of clothing in general. So this information can be used in a lot of different

situations when talking about clothing.

So, we'll start from the top, and we will work our way down. So, from the top, we have

the collar of the shirt. So this is called the collar. Now, two verbs that we often use

with collars are: "Fix your collar", or: "Pop your collar". Now, again, "to fix your collar"

this means that maybe your collar is up on one side, like this, or there's something

wrong with it. You can just use the verb "fix". Fix your collar. Okay? Now, "to pop your collar"

is to do this, to put it up, because it looks so cool and ridiculous. So maybe not in the

context of dress shirts would you pop your collar, but the verb is "pop". Do you like

this look, Steve? Yeah, I don't really like it either. So I'm going to fix my collar and

put it back to normal.

Now, here we have a pocket. So, simply put, you can put things in your pocket. And this

part of the shirt, these are called your sleeves. Now, again, shirts can have long sleeves or

short sleeves. So, again, it can have long sleeves or short sleeves. Here, you have two

expressions that I put: "Roll up" and "roll down". So if it's time to work hard, you can

say: "Time to roll up your sleeves." So to roll up your sleeves is to do this. To roll

them down is to put them back down. And again, you can think about many contexts where you

roll up your sleeves. So if you have to go to the doctor and donate blood, or if you

have to, you know, it's really hot, you need to roll up your sleeves. Or if you just say:

"You know what? It's time to work hard. Let's roll up our sleeves."

And here we have cuffs. So, this part of the shirt, these are called your cuffs. And finally,

we have the buttons. So your shirt has buttons everywhere here. Right? Buttons, buttons,

buttons, buttons, and more buttons.

Now, let's continue talking about buttons by talking about some of the verbs and actions

that you can do with buttons. It's very exciting. I promise. Here we go. Okay, you ready, Steve?

So, buttons. Exciting stuff. Now, you can see in this shirt, the top button is not buttoned.

So if someone's button is not buttoned, you can say: "Your button is undone." or: "Your

shirt is undone."

Now, in this situation, you can also give advice to, you know, put the button how it's

supposed to be. And we have a couple of phrases that we can use to do this. So, you can say:

"Button your shirt up." You can also say: "Button up your shirt." So, this is a phrasal

verb, to button up. And it's a separable phrasal verb, so you can put the object in the middle

or at the end. So you can say: "Button your shirt up.", "Button up your shirt." You can

also use the phrasal verb to do up. So you can do the buttons up, or do up the buttons.

"Do up your shirt." or: "Do your shirt up." Okay? So I'm going to do up or button up the

final button, here. It's very difficult when it's a loose shirt. Still got it, Steve? Okay.

He's building his muscles right now. He's a strong spider.

Now, if you want to unbutton, you can simply say: "Unbutton your shirt." And just like

we have the verb "do", you can also use the verb "undo" to remove the buttons. So undo

your shirt, or undo the buttons, unbutton your shirt. You can also unbutton one button,

unbutton the top button or the bottom button. Whatever it is.

Okay, so if you'd like to test your understanding of all of this exciting vocabulary, as always,

you can check out the quiz on www.engvid.com. And don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube

channel. I'll see you guys later.

All right, Steve, we're going to that restaurant now. Let's do it. What is it? The arachnobar,

something like that? Okay, anyway, we'll figure it out. See you guys.