Hi this is Tutor Nick P and this is Idioms 249. The idiom today is to go belly up.
Okay. Let's take a look at the note here. We
actually have three different definitions. The first one is to fail or
go bankrupt. Yeah. We often use it for businesses going bankrupt or going out
of business. We say that they've gone belly-up. All right. It could be
breakdown, malfunction, die or fall apart. So it could be you know. machines or some
building. So any one of them could be breaking down, malfunctioning, dying or
falling apart. We could also say that that machine or that car went belly-up.
You could use it in that situation. Number three here. To have a disastrous
or undesirable outcome. So a bad result very , very bad result. All right. Let's
continue here. The idea of this ...of this idiom comes from the idea of a dead
animal found lying on its back with its stomach or belly facing upwards or the
way a dead fish floats in the water. Yeah I'm sure you've seen some bugs like this,
especially if you put down some poison or you might have seen this with
cockroaches. I think if you put down some baking soda or something and they eat
the baking soda that happens to them or or some other bugs where you know, they
died they turned around and they're lying belly-up. So that's the... that's
where the idea of this idiom actually comes from. All right. Let's continue here.
Let's give several examples. So example number one. After the dot-com bubble
burst you know, that was around the early 2000s, many early Internet companies went
belly-up. So they went out of business or they
went bankrupt. They failed. That's what we would mean. All right number two. His
dream of being a singer went belly-up when he got eliminated in the first
round of that American Idol contest. Yeah. Again maybe this was somebody who
thought they had some talent. They realized they didn't. So it was a bad
outcome or an undesirable outcome for him. Maybe it kind of crushed his dream. All
right number three. Many record stores went belly-up after it became popular to
download songs from the Internet. It didn't all happen in a day, but really in
about five years or six years many of them more already starting to go very...
just go out of business. So just go bankrupt. Just, just closed up. It wasn't
worth it. They weren't making enough profit. So again they failed or they went
bankrupt. They went out. All right and the last one here. His goal of being a
professional football player went belly-up after he had a career-ending
injury. Yeah. This happens to a lot of these college players. Sometimes they
think they might have a career. You know a good chance of making it
professional. But it doesn't you know, even if it in
college, you could have a career-ending injury. If you know you fell the wrong
way or you ended up at the bottom of a pile of football players on top of you.
You never know or just hit the wrong way. You can have a career-ending injury and
that's it your your dream is gone. Okay. Anyway I hope you got it. I hope it was clear.
Thank you for your time. Bye-bye.