English Vocabulary - Getting Dressed

Hello everyone, my name is Rani and today I'm going to talk to you about something that

we do every day, I hope, as a routine.

It's called getting dressed.

Getting dressed is putting on or taking off your clothes.

We usually use these and only these phrasal verbs when we refer to getting dressed.

We say put on or take off.

Now, we use these with clothes, okay?

If it's something like, for example, contact lenses, we actually say put in or take out.

I'll write that for you after.

So this is only for clothes, something you wear on your body, not in your body.

So check it out.

Usually in the morning, we're going to take off pajamas.

We like to call them PJs.

PJs are usually what people wear at night time.

And after you've taken off your PJs, maybe you have a shower, and you're going to put

on your clothes.

Now, ladies, sometimes you wear a dress.

Men, if you'd like to wear a dress too, go right ahead.

But be careful, especially for my Japanese and Korean listeners, a dress is only called

that.

In Japan, I know you guys call it a one-piece.

It makes sense, but we never say one-piece in Canada or in English.

We always say a dress.

So please take your lovely word, one-piece, and now call it a dress.

Good.

The next one that's very, very popular, one of my favorites, is a hoodie.

A hoodie is like a sweatshirt.

It's made out of a very thick cotton material.

The difference is a hoodie has a magical hood.

So I will attempt to draw a picture of a hoodie.

This is going well.

Good.

There's my very short arms.

Good.

All right.

Here we are.

So a hoodie is a sweatshirt or a thick sweatshirt with one of these things called a hood.

Hoodies are a very Canadian, very American kind of slang expression that we've made because

of the hood part.

The other thing that we have a few different words for are jogging, sweat, or track pants.

These are really comfortable, loose-fitting cotton pants.

It's using the same material as your sweatshirt or your hoodie, and I believe a lot of you

know these as trainers.

That's fine.

British people would call them trainers, but we call them actually jogging, sweat, or track

pants.

Just a fashion tip, don't wear these together to the mall.

It looks bad.

The next thing that we have to learn is the phrasal verb "do up."

Do up means to attach.

Once you've actually put the clothes on your body, you need to make sure they don't fall

off.

How embarrassing.

These are a few of the different ways that we actually can attach the clothes to our

body.

The first one is actually a French word.

It's taken from two French words, and it's velcro.

Velcro is the material that it can be made to attach shoes together or jackets, and when

you rip it open, it makes that sound.

Velcro has a side that is usually hard, and then the opposite side is usually a lot softer,

and when it forms together, it's really, really difficult to become dis-attached.

Dis-attached.

That's not a word, Ronnie.

Dis-attached.

To become detached.

Right word.

It's really good for clothing.

In the '80s, a lot of kids had those velcro shoes, velcro Reeboks, really cool, making

the fashion trend again, not wearing them.

So velcro is actually, it was a brand name, but now we use it as a name that we don't

always call it.

It's used on jackets a lot and, again, in shoes.

Buttons.

Buttons.

We usually find them in a lot of shirts.

They look like this.

They can have two holes or four holes, it doesn't matter, and you do up the buttons.

You do up the velcro.

You do up snaps.

You do up your zipper.

Snaps are a little bit like buttons, except they're smaller, and the cool thing about

snaps is they make a sound like a snap when you put them together.

You can't really see them.

Buttons have holes in them, snaps have no holes, and when you put the two together,

they make a noise.

That's why they're called snaps.

The next one we see a lot of are zippers.

Quite hard to draw a zipper.

Usually if you have a pair of jeans, you have a zipper that you need to do up, or it's very

hard to draw a zipper.

I'm going to attempt to draw a picture of a zipper.

That's as good as it gets.

There you are.

Here are your jeans, and there's your massive zipper.

The part on your jeans that has the zipper is called a fly, not a verb but an ounce.

So the fly is the zipper of your jeans.

If someone tells you, "Excuse me, your fly is down," I don't say fly, "No, your fly is

down."

"The barn door is open," they might say as well.

That means the zipper on your pants is down, and you need to pull it up.

Just another fashion tip for everyone out there.

I hope you enjoyed this.

I hope you learned.

I hope you laughed.

For more fun times, visit www.engvid.com.

Good-bye.