In this English lesson I wanted to help you learn
the English phrase, a bird's-eye view.
When you have a bird's-eye view of something,
it means that you are really high up
and you are looking down.
Maybe you are on a mountain top,
or maybe you are on a bridge
and you are looking down at something.
You would say that you have a bird's-eye view.
I think you can understand where this phrase comes from.
When a bird is in the sky,
the bird has a really good view of everything below it.
We would say that the bird has a bird's-eye view.
So if you are on the roof of a building,
or if you are up somewhere high and you are looking down,
we would say that you have a bird's-eye view.
The reason I chose this phrase this morning
is because when I walked outside,
there was a gigantic bird on top of my farm machinery shed.
I think it was a hawk or it may be some kind of vulture.
So that bird definitely had a bird's-eye view.
And that bird is what caused me to look up idioms
that have the word bird in it.
The second phrase I have is the phrase as free as a bird.
For some reason,
I guess we think birds are the most free animal
in the world.
And when someone is in prison and they get out
and they are free, we say they are as free as a bird.
Sometimes we say,
when people are older and all of their children move out
of the house, that they are now as free as a bird.
Actually, we wouldn't say they.
We would say he is as free as a bird,
or she is as free as a bird, or they are as free as birds.
That would be the right way to say it,
which is where I think the phrase empty nesters come from.
The phrase, empty nesters,
refers to people when their youngest child moves out
of the house and they are just home, just the two of them.
So they are now empty nesters.
The nest is empty and they would both be free as birds.
Anyways, let's look at a comment from a previous video.
This is from the video where I talked about wearing shades
and made in the shade.
And this comment comes from Brent.
American English With This Guy.
And Brent says, love the shades. Thanks Brent.
I was wearing shades in the last video.
In the United States, a new term is throwing shade.
That is when you try to make someone feel bad
by putting them down and saying mean things about them.
And my response is, this language is never complete, is it?
We just have to keep inventing new words and phrases.
So hard for people who are learning the language.
Well, thanks, Brent, for that new phrase.
Yes, the term throwing shade just started to be used
in the last few years, and became really popular
in the past year.
When you throw shade, it's when you say mean things
about someone, sometimes publicly.
I think you can look up some headlines where Taylor Swift
was throwing shade at other celebrities.
Anyways, great new phrase.
Thank you so much for that, Brent.
Awesome that the language evolves.
I think that's one of the things
that makes the language beautiful.
But it's also one of the things that makes the language
really hard for people to learn.
I know in a previous comment,
you can notice my speed just went up a little bit.
I'm back to normal speed.
In a previous comment on a video, someone said,
if you teach one phrase every day, Bob,
how many years will it take before I know this language
and I didn't really have a good answer,
except that learning a language is a really long process.
As you know, I don't really like videos
that say master English in 30 days,
or learn English in three months,
because learning a language takes a really long time.
There's no quick and easy recipe.
Hard work now pays off somewhere down the road.
The more work you do every day, the more you do.
Sorry, totally lost my train of thought.
The more work you do every day as you work towards your goal
of fluency, the better it will be down the road.
So learn a little bit of English every day. Do your best.
The language does keep changing,
but it's a cool language to learn, I think.