Learn the English Phrases TOP DOG and SECOND BANANA / SECOND FIDDLE

Read along to practice your English and to learn the English phrases TOP DOG and SECOND BANANA / FIDDLE

In this English lesson, I wanted to help you learn the English phrase top dog. If you are the top dog somewhere, it means you have the most power or you are the best. If you think about a sports team, for example, the person on the team who scores the most points every game and all season, we would call that person the top dog. If you look at something like the place where you work, your boss is the top dog, they are the person that has the most power in that organization. So when you refer to someone as the top dog, it means that they are the most powerful person, the person who has the most power, or the person who performs the best in some sort of situation, like a sports team or at a place where you work.

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Which is a little different than second banana. If you are second banana, it means there's one person who's a little bit better than you. We also sometimes use the phrase second fiddle. So maybe you have a sports team that you like to watch, and your favorite player was the top dog for many, many years, but now they've hired a new younger player who's much better, and now your favorite player has become second banana. They're not top dog anymore, now they're second banana or they're second fiddle, which probably isn't a good feeling. I think when you're really good at something, when you're the best on a team for a long time, when you're top dog for a very long time, it probably doesn't feel very good when some new younger person comes in and suddenly you are second banana or second fiddle, not the greatest feeling in the world.

So to review, if you refer to someone as top dog, it means they are the best in an organization or maybe they have the most power in an organization. And when you say that someone is second banana or second fiddle, it means that they are now outclassed by one person. Sometimes we even say that they play second fiddle, but sorry, I was looking for the comment from the last video in my inside pocket, but it's actually in my side pocket.

So let's look at a comment from a previous video. And this comment is from Judit, who is a long-time viewer of my channel, I really appreciate Judit, she has been around for a very long time and leaves really, really good comments. And the comment that Judit left is this. "Great explanation and I'm happy you helped Jen." And my response was this, "It's nice to help Jen, and to get out and do physical work as well. There's a saying in English, you can take the boy off the farm, but you can't take the farm out of the boy. This means that kids who grow up on farms usually remember it fondly."

So thank you, Judit, for that comment. Judit, I think it's good that you appreciate that I helped Jen. I think that this flower farm is kind of, it's a job for two people, and I need to help out as much as I can because there's just things where, you know, many hands make light work, when two people do certain jobs, it just goes a lot better. And the phrase, yeah, it means that, a lot of times, kids who grow up on farms, when they move to the city, they miss living on the farm, not all children who grow up on farms are that way, but I certainly can identify with this phrase, you can take the boy off the farm, but you can't take the farm out of the boy, because I know when I lived in the city when I was in university, I found the city very loud.

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