What to say when you make a mistake!
Did you make a mistake again? What did you say? In today's lesson I'm going to teach you about the many expressions you can use when you make mistakes! I'll teach you modern, old-fashioned, formal, and slang expressions. These are great everyday expressions that you can start using in conversations right away. So watch this lesson and do the quiz at https://www.engvid.com/what-to-say-when-you-make-a-mistake/ , but be careful not to f@*k it up!
TRANSCRIPT
Oops. Oh. Oops. Oh. Oops. I made a mistake three times. My name's Ronnie. I forgot that I was going to make lessons today, and instead of wearing, you know, like normal clothes, I decided to be a lion. I guess I really messed up. I'm sorry. [Laughs] I'm not sorry at all. I'm going to teach you by request from Germany-hi, guys-what to say when stuff goes wrong. So you make a mistake; everyone makes mistakes, it's normal, don't worry. We have certain slang phrases that you can say, makes you sound cool. Rainier , if you want to sound cool, you can do this.
Most popular ones, we would say: "I screwed up." or "I messed up." or "I f*@ked up." We can also say: "I mucked it up." All of these expressions just mean: "Oops, I made a mistake." So you can say, for example: "I messed up my job interview." Or: "Oh my god, I really f*@ked up my car." It means that maybe you had an accident and now your car is destroyed. So all of these just means there was an accident, or a mistake, or something bad happened. So, be careful. These are phrasal verbs, so we have: "screw up", "messed up", "f*@ked up", and "mucked up".
Then we have nouns. So these are describing usually a person. You can say: "somebody is a screw up", "someone is a f*@k up". It means that they always make mistakes. Maybe they're a little bit stupid. They're just not doing things as they should. You will see this a lot in movies. There's always, like, the teenage boy, and his dad's like: "You're such a f*@k up! You can't do anything right!" And the kid: "Wah", and drama happens. So we use these a lot in movies as well.
Something that I remember my grandmother and my mother saying was: "Oh dash", "Oh darn". Now, these are... We'll call them mother and grandmother expressions. They're not offensive, they're not slang. It's kind of a nice way to say: "Oops." I remember when I was a child there was a TV show called The Mad Dash, and I was like: "Gran, you should be on that show, because you say: 'Oh dash.'" "Dash" means to run quickly, so I couldn't understand why she was wanting to run quickly. It must be a grandmother thing. You might hear people also say: "Oh my gosh" or "Oh my goodness". These are just ways for people who don't want to say: "Oh my god". Some people get offended if you say: "Oh my god", so instead of saying: "god", they say: "goodness" or "gosh". "Oh my gosh". Okay? But it basically means: "Oh my god", or "darn", or "dash", or "oops". Okay? Mm-kay.
We have another expression. You might know: "That sucks." It's a kind of an older expression. We also have an expression that something blows. You can say, past tense: "I blew it. I really blew it." It means: "I really messed up or I really made a mistake. I'm sorry." So you can use it like: "I blew the job interview." or: "I screwed up the job interview.", "I messed up the job interview." Another way we use this is to talk about money. You can say: "I blew all my money on beer." Which is not a good thing. It means that you spent all of your money only on beer. Don't do that. You need to, you know, save money for beer, save for everything. But if you blow your money on something it means you spent it all. So you'll hear this, again, a lot in movies, we use it all the time.
One thing that is another common word that we use a lot in computers, maybe you see if your computer's in English is for technology, something crashes. You'll see it in a lot of sci-fi movies, too. If something crashed it means it's broken temporarily. Not for a long time. So: "My p.c. or my computer crashed." This is only for software or electronics. So if your computer crashes, it means you're working on it or you're doing something, and then all of a sudden - gone. What's happened to your computer? Probably when you're doing important things it just decides not to work anymore. So your computer crashed. You can say: "My computer bit it." or "My computer choked." It just means it's broken, it doesn't work anymore.
You can say: "I bit it!" I used to say this a lot when I was skiing. If I fell, it was: "Oh, I bit it again." It just means you made a mistake or you failed. "I choked on my test." It's not this. Again: "I bit it" and "I choked" means you failed the test. So: "I choked the job interview.", "I choked on something." It just means you didn't do well.
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