What Do I Wear?

Hello everyone! Welcome back to another lesson with us here atEnglishPod! My name is Marco.

My name is Catherine and that’s us.

And that’s us. And today we’re gonna talk about a very common situation when you… when you’re a couple, when you have a girlfriend…

Honey, come on!

Let’s go…

I wanna go.

Are you ???

You are taking forever.

Alright, who takes long? Like do you take a long time to get ready, to get dressed?

Okay, I take longer to get ready, but my boyfriend takes longer in general, because he’s like checking his e-mail, playing video games.

Hehe.

Like just, you know, we… we call it lollygagging. He’s just like…

Lollygagging.

Being kind of slow.

Hm, I’m the opposite. I usually… I usually start getting ready later, like if we have to leave at nine, I start getting ready at 8:30, but I’ll be really by nine.

Uhu.

Because I… I take a shower real fast, get dressed, and I know what I’m gonna wear and all my clothes are ready. But on the other hand, my girlfriend takes forever to get ready and she’s like: oh… and then, you know, the hair and…

Girls have makeup and tights and… and you should…

Ugh, but this is I don’t understand if we’re supposed to leave at nine, why don’t you start getting ready before?

Never underestimate women… well, I mean, I don’t know.

Hehe. Procrastination.

It's not even about procrastination. Sometimes it just takes longer to look good than other times.

Hehe. Right. Well, in this case we’re gonna be looking at a lesson where it’s the opposite – the husband is taking a long time to get ready. And, well, I don’t think he has a very good fashion sense, right?

He does not. And we’re gonna learn what that phrase means in a minute here, but before we get going, we’ve got a couple of words to preview to help you understand what’s going on in today’s dialogue. Voice: Vocabulary preview.

Alright, so, on vocabulary preview today we have two words. Uh, the first one can be a noun or a verb – to iron.

Or, [an] iron.

Wow. Hehe. So, uh, to iron basically means to…

To get the wrinkles out of clothes, and so we use this… iron is actually, uh, a metal.

Uhu.

It’s a very, uh, important metal. And, uh, an iron is a machine that we plug in, we use it to get the wrinkles – the lines – out of our… our shirts and our skirts and everything and so, it’s actually is very important thing to make sure that you look nice and put together.

Right, so you use an iron to iron your shirt or to your… iron your skirt. And, uh, then we have sandals – my favorite type of shoes.

Mine too.

Sandals.

I have a friend who used to say she has claustrophobic feet. Her feet didn’t like to be in closed spaces…

Oh, really?

And so she only wore sandals.

So these are, uh, open shoes, open-toe shoes, basically.

Yeah.

You wear them at the beach.

Or you wear them in the summer, in general.

Uhu.

I’m wearing sandals right now.

And you have different types of sandals like sandals and flip-flops, right?

Flip-flops, I think they’re called that, because they sound like flip-flop-flip-flop.

Flop-flop-flop when you walk. Alright, so those are two words today. Let’s listen to the dialogue for the first time and then we’ll be back.

Alright, we’re back. So, uh, interesting. This, uh, husband sounded a lot like a famous president, I think.

He did, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Hehe. Alright.

Before we do, uh, talk about who this guy is, I think it’d be a great idea to talk about some of these clothing terms, because they are very useful for when you wanna go shopping and for when you’re getting dressed. Voice: Language takeaway.

Okay, so the first word that we have on language takeaway isstriped. [NOTE: do not confuse it with stripped; they look similar in writing, but have different pronunciations]

Alright, you might have heard the American flag called stars and stripes.

Uhu.

Stripes are those lines on clothing or on flags that go up and down or left and right.

Exactly, so you have… if you have a striped shirt, you have many lines on your shirt that are going up and down or left and right.

Right, and they say with fashion, lines that go left to right make you look fatter…

Uhu.

And lines that go up and down make you look thinner.

And taller.

And taller.

Very good. And, uh, now moving on, if it’s summer and you wanna wear a shirt, you can wear a short-sleeved shirt.

Alright, this is important, so most people like to wear short-sleeved shirts in the summer time, because they’re cooler.

Uhu.

Uh, and in the winter time that means we like to wear long-sleeved shirts.

Okay, so the sleeves are basically the arms of the shirt, so…

Exactly.

You say short-sleeved…

Uhu.

Very good. And then we have a checkered shirt or a checkered sweater in this case.

Okay, so checkered means there are, um, little squares…

Squares.

On the shirt and usually one square is one color and the next square is another color, so it looks like a checkerboard.

Uhu, very good.

Like game, you know checkers.

Or like a chessboard.

Exactly, and so in this case we’ve got a guy who’s trying to wear astriped shirt and a checkered sweater.

That does not go well together, right?

Ugh, no.

No. Hehe.

Too much stuff happening.

Too… it’s too busy.

Too busy.

Alright, and not only that, but he wanted to wear, um, shorts, because he liked the cut and the hemline.

Okay, these are actually terms that we normally use with women’s clothing…

Aha.

Because, uh, you could say: I like the cut of this dress - I like the… the shape that it has.

Very good.

Um, and hemline is the bottom of your skirt or your trousers or your shorts. And hemline, we could say, my mother used to say this to me: the hemline is much too high.

Uh, okay.

Much too short. That skirt…

Uh, the skirt.

Is not appropriate, yeah. So, it’s nice to have a hemline at the knee. Hehe.

Hehe. Alright, so the cut is the shape that, uh, the piece of closing has, like pants or skirts. And the hemline would be the place where it ends, right? The… the skirt, for example.

Like it… it pretty much tells you the lengths of something.

Very good. And… and now, well… and now the wife steps in and she’s like: no, you not wearing this. She’s telling him that he has to wear nice clothes and among those items is a silk tie.

Okay, so a classic Father’s Day gift.

Silk tie.

I’ve given this one a couple of times. A silk tie is, you know, a neck tie – a long neck tie – that’s made of silk.

Silk is a very soft material, right?

Uhu.

Very expensive as well.

It can be, especially Italian silk.

Uhu, and I’ve always actually wanted to have silk sheets.

Ooh, si… I don’t know, I feel like they would get very warm in the summer.

Yeah, well, in the winter it would be awesome, but…

Yeah.

It probably very cold in the winter as well.

Yeah, I don’t know.

I don’t know… well, it’s one of those things. And, uh… and then she’s also telling him to wear some corduroy pants.

Okay, so it sounds like this might be a winter dialogue.

Yeah.

Because corduroy is not something that you wear in the summer, because it’s very heavy and thick.

Uhu.

Corduroy actually is a fabric that, um… that usually has these kind of ribs or… or ridges.

Aha.

And so there’s like little lines in the fabric that make it quite thick and, um, rough when you almost… not rough, but they make it s… feel very unique when you touch it.

Yeah, it’s not smooth, it’s a little bit rough, the…

Yeah.

The fabric. Very good. So those are all the… the clothing items that we’ve looked at today. There’s a lot of them and obviously we’ll post a couple of pictures on… on the site, so you can see, uh… and… so you can see better what a silk tie looks like or especially corduroy pants.

Corduroy, yeah.

Alright, so, uh, let’s listen to this dialogue again. We’re gonna slow it down a little bit and then we’ll come back and look at some of the phrases. DIALOGUE, SECOND TIME (slow)

Alright, we’re back so, uh, now let’s start with “fluency builder”. Voice: Fluency builder.

Okay, these are classic couple phrases, right?

Hehe.

These are phrases you hear among couples and the first one is maybe more common to hear from the female end, but it’s not unknown on the male end, so…

Right.

We have this question: do you like the way this looks?

Uhu, so, while this per… while the person is saying this, they would maybe like be moving to the side a little bit, like…

Hm…

Do you like the…

Modeling it.

Hehe. Do you like the way this looks? So basically you’re saying: do you like what I’m wearing; does it look good on me?

Does it look good, exactly. You could also say: hey, I like the way this looks.

Uhu.

When you’re trying to buy something at the store and so, do you like the way this looks is a way for you to ask the other person’s opinion of how you look.

And also another common phrase especially with men who have no, uh… no fashion sense, the wife says: what am I going to do with you?

Okay, this is an interesting phrase and it needs some explanation I think, because, uh, the meaning is… well, this is very difficult…

Hehe.

Right? So, “you’re being difficult” or “wow, you need some help from me”.

Yeah.

I’m gonna help you.

How am I going to help you this much? Or all the time like this?

Right, because she’s pretty much saying he has no idea about clothing and fashion. So she’s… he’s saying to her: what am… she’s saying to him: what am I going to do with you?

Uhu.

It means: you need so much help.

Hehe. Seriously. Alright, so, uh… and… and the third phrase that we saw… we… that we saw and we said at the very beginning isfashion sense.

Okay, so this is actually what the man needs help with.

Fashion sense.

He needs help with his fashion sense, because he has zero fashion sense.

Right.

And this is pretty much a way to say, uh, um, how much someone knows about fashion or appearances and so, I can say, you know: oh, my friend Cathy, she has amazing fashion sense, so…

So maybe…

She always looks good.

Right, so combining colors appropriately or wearing the right types of shoes with the right types of clothing, et cetera. Fashion sense.

Or even just being able to wear things that are good on her or telling other people what’s good on them.

Uhu.

Um, so fashion sense is the ability to, uh… to identify fashion and look good and make other people look good.

Alright, very good. Let’s listen to this dialogue for the very last time and, uh, we’ll come back and talk a little bit more about fashion, because it’s a very interesting topic.

It is.

Alright, we’re back. Uh, you lived in Italy for a while.

I did.

How is fashion over there? Is it extreme like we see on therunways, because I honestly don’t understand fashion.

Well, the thing about runways is that that’s not how normal people dress.

Well… yeah… that’s what I don’t understand. Why do they have these fashion shows if people don’t really buy these types of clothing?

Well, sometimes people like s… stores, for example, big stores, department stores will buy fashions off of the runway and they’ll kind of change them a little bit, so that they’re more appropriate for normalconsumption.

Hehe.

That means for normal people who wanna wear them. Um, but the runway fashions are actually… they kind of like exaggerations of trends that will happen in… in the shopping world, right?

Uhu

In the commercial word, so… the things that you see are like big blown-up exaggerations and we take bits and pieces of those in our daily lives to dress up, so different colors or fabrics or like oftentimes you see kind of military outfits…

Yeah.

And so, that will translate into military jackets that are very popular one…

Uhu.

One season. And so, Italy definitely counts as a very fashionable country…

Yeah.

But it’s not crazy. People… you… every once in a while you see someone with crazy clothes, but I think Jap… Japan is much more crazy as far as style.

Yeah, actually, yeah, Asian countries such as Japan or South Korea, they have very also unique fashion as well, but, um, it’s very, ah… extreme to a certain point and the color combinations they do is like red sneakers with green pants and like a blue jacket…

Yeah.

It’s very crazy.

Bright.

And very bright.

And you often see these shoes, you know, we call them platform shoes. They’re… it’s kind of like you’re standing on a brick.

Yeah.

Or on a book.

They are huge.

And they’re, you know… they’re seven inches tall…

Uhu.

And you see these little girls wearing these big shoes and I just… I’m so scared when I see them, cause I feel like they’re gonna fall over.

Hehe. The other thing is that fashion is so expensive. If you actually wanna buy, uh, something that’s in… in like in authentic, uh… I don’t know, Carolina Herrera or Oscar de la Renta or something like that, it’s so expensive.

It is, but you know high fashion is expensive.

Yeah.

Um, fashion is not, doesn’t have to be. You can… you can be fashionable just looking at, um, different stores and going to second hand shops and making your own clothes. I mean it’s all about a sense of personal style and dressing yourself to be unique.

Or you can get it at the fake market.

Or you can go to the fake market, exactly.

Hehe. Alright, that’s all the time we have for today, guys. I hope, uh, you enjoyed this lesson. Please come to our website and comment at englishpod.com. And if you have any other suggestions or maybe your own pictures of crazy fashion, you can post. We’re glad to see them, so, uh, we’ll see you guys there.

Yeah, as Marco said, hope to see you on the website. That’s about it for today, so…

Alright.

Goodbye everyone!

Bye! ***