Hi, there I'm Drew Badger, the English Fluency Guide. And in a recent video, I was talking
about news headlines and I just gave a simple example of how you can learn a lot about how
to think and to speak like a native speaker by just even focusing on the headlines of
a story. So you learn a lot about politics and history or culture, but a lot about the
language itself because native speakers, especially when they're writing for something as short
as a headline, they have to put a lot of information in there to explain a lot about what the story
is. But they also have to make it interesting so you want to click on it. Really it's the
same thing people like I do when you have to make a YouTube video and you have to think
of some kind of headline for it. But what's tricky is I have to communicate to people
who don't understand a lot of spoken English. So I have to be very particular about the
words I use. But anyway, in this video, I'm going to cover
two recent headlines because people were interested in learning more about that. And at the end
of this video, if you'd like to learn more, let me know. You can let me know down in the
comments below. So I'll just quickly go over two recent headlines, one from CNN and one
from Fox News. And then really we'll just talk very quickly about them and then help
you understand them more, the same way native speaker would.
So the first one is from CNN.com. I'll just read you the whole thing. It's actually very
short and this is talking about coronavirus and this is "COVID-19 Cases Spike in the U.S.".
Now this is a really very short and simple headline, but the key word here that might
be new for some people is to spike. Now, spike, if you think about a physical spike, like
some kind of long, thin thing that comes up out of some location. It could be the spike
on some kind of weapon, but it's just the long pointy thing, almost like a pencil.
But when we're talking about data, so we have a line of data. Maybe today there are only
five people who get some virus or five people that something happens to them. And the next
day, some, maybe seven people or six, but the day after that, we get 2,000 people. We
call that a spike because on a line or like a line graph, it looks like we have very few
people and then suddenly it goes straight up like that. Maybe it goes back down again.
But typically we're just talking about going up very fast. So we call this a spike because
it's physically looking like a spike. So when you want to talk about something increasing
very quickly, you can talk about in this case, we have the number of people who are getting
a sickness, or you could talk about a spike in sales or a spike in activity for whatever.
It doesn't really matter what the thing is, but anytime you're talking about something
that's rapidly increasing, you can describe this as a spike, a spike.
Okay. So the next one is from Fox News. This one's a little bit different. It's basically
two headlines coming together and we'll talk about a few things in this. So the first part
of this is "Biden's Bad Day". So they're talking about this is in the run up to the election
later this year. So we're talking about Joe Biden, so "Biden's Bad Day". And then we have
"Ex-VP Greeted by Trump Fans, Makes Gaff During Campaign Stop". Now, there are a few couple,
just a couple of things in here that I wanted to point out. First of all, remember that
news and just kind of people in general, but often news outlets specifically, they want
to tell you the news, but they usually have a particular slant on it. So Fox News is typically
a bit more conservative or Republican. So they're almost a kind of happily saying Biden
had a bad day. So when something in the news happens, it's
interesting if you look at maybe how it is reported on CNN, which is going to usually
give a different description or what we would call a narrative than something like Fox News.
But anyway, so they're saying Biden's bad day and then ex-VP. So they're saying the
ex-vice president greeted by Trump fans makes gaff during campaigns stop. So a campaign
stop, we're talking about campaigning for reelection or for election. So you're going
to different places, especially like Trump or Biden right now, they're going around to
different places in the United States and giving speeches or meeting people, talking
to people, these are called stops on a campaign or the campaign trail. The same way you would
have bus stops or train stops, that kind of thing.
So we're talking about Biden going to different places. And in this particular location Ex-Vice
President Biden is greeted... and again, we're saying hello, like to greet someone, but you
notice it's in quote marks. So the reason it's in quote marks is because we're changing
the meaning of the word greeted. So in this sense, it's more people that are not happy
to see him. They're not positive about him being there. And so they're usually greeting
someone in this sense saying, "Well, we don't want you here or we don't like you, or hurray
for President Trump." Something like that. So this is a thing you usually see at a campaign
stop. There will be some people who support the person and some people who are against
that person. So the people who are against that person are going to greet you with a
not very friendly greeting. So that's why that's in quotes.
Sometimes you will see something in quotes if it's what a person said, but here they're
describing this as kind of, "Ha ha, Biden was greeted by some not so friendly greetings
from people." And then, so he was greeted by Trump fans, and then he makes a gaff. Now
this is a... the word gaff here just means you made some kind of mistake. Usually it's
not that big of a deal. So not too important, but something where maybe you say something
that could be interpreted badly or maybe you make a joke and someone isn't thinking it's
very funny, that kind of thing. So this is a kind of a lower level of making some kind
of mistake, but where you say something that other people might think is stupid. So that's
to make a gaff. So when we're looking at all these things,
this is "Biden's Bad Day". And again, this is Fox saying that even though maybe Biden
didn't even care, like he's just a normal person going to different places. And he expects
Trump supporters are not going to be so friendly to him. So he's greeted again, not very friendly,
by Trump fans. He makes some kind of mistake. He says something bad during a campaign stop.
So you can see how we have all this information here in just a small number of words. And
when you look at headlines like this and really try to understand them, if you're doing this
by yourself, you can look at headlines, go back and look at the story as well, and try
to understand what that's meaning. And you can look up the different words or phrases
that are being used. Often non-natives, when they're trying to understand some kind of
word, they will look up the definition for a single word and usually that's not going
to help you understand something because it might be an idiom where the different words,
the meanings of those different words have a different meaning altogether. So try to
look up maybe one word by itself, if you don't know what it means, but expand that search.
So if you're looking for makes a gaff. So instead of just look up the word gaff, maybe
makes gaff. And again, this is pretty standard English.
There's no idioms or anything in this, but you can look at kind of understanding what
a word means, but if you don't quite understand it, maybe you can expand your search if you're
typing that into Google, just put quotes around that so you can see the meaning of that. So
you can type in whatever, like break a leg. So this means to do a good job. You could
tell people before they're going out in a performance in a play or something like that
to break a leg. So do a good job. But it doesn't really sound like a good thing you can say.
So instead of looking up the words individually, you try to look up the whole thing and see
what that means. Hopefully that makes sense. Anyway, if you enjoy looking at these different
headlines and you want to learn more, have more analysis of this, just again, it's a
really valuable thing to look at these and they will help you, the more you look at them,
understand the way native speakers are communicating. Because often what you'll find is you want
to say something as a non-native, that's it maybe takes too long to express something,
or you think you should use a lot of words when really there's a very simple way to express
something. So learn to think like natives do by the way or you can kind of learn to
think the way natives do by studying or looking at what natives are using to communicate.
And headlines are a great way to do that. Well, if you'd like to see more of those,
let me know in the comments down below. Do like this video, share it, click that little
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