Bob's Short English Lessons Learn the English Phrases IN THE GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS and IN THE LONG RUN
Read along to practice your English and to learn the English phrases IN THE GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS and IN THE LONG RUN
In this English lesson, I wanted to help you learn the English phrase, "in the grand scheme of things." This is usually used to talk about something negative that doesn't really affect you in your entire life or in the thing that you are doing. Maybe that didn't make a lot of sense. Let me give you a specific example. Let's say you usually get an A+ on every single test, but you get an F on one test. If you have 10 or 12 tests during the school year, in the grand scheme of things, that one failure doesn't really matter because everything will average out and you'll still get a really good grade. We also use this to talk about things like eating sweets. If you eat something sweet maybe once a week, in the grand scheme of things, it's not going to cause you to put on weight. It's when you start eating sweets every day where that starts to happen. So when you say "in the grand scheme of things," it means over a long period of time, or when you look at your whole life as a whole
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The second phrase I wanted to teach you today is, "in the long run." We use this to talk about things where over time, something might happen. Here's a good example. If you used to go to a drive-through every morning and buy a coffee, if you do that, then in the long run, you're going to end up spending a lot of money. So basically over a period of time, that's going to end up costing you quite a bit. In the long run, it's actually quite expensive. Each day, it might not seem that way. Spending a dollar or $2 for a cup of coffee doesn't seem too expensive, but if you look at it in the long run, it's going to add up and be quite expensive.
So to review, when you say that something is in the grand scheme of things, it kind of means over a large portion of time or in your life in general, and when you say in the long run, it's somewhat similar. It refers to a long period of time. I hope those definitions made sense. I'm a little tired from teaching today so hopefully there's no confusion.
But hey, let's look at a comment from a previous video. This comment is from Jacques and the comment is, "Hi, Bob. The next time your siblings want to be in control, you could remind them of the saying, 'Too many cooks spoil the broth.' Best regards." And my response was, "Or I could say, 'Many hands make light work.'" I always find it funny that we have two sayings and they mean the opposite of each other.
Yes, we definitely have those two sayings in English and it is kind of funny, isn't it? One of the sayings is "Too many cooks spoil the broth," which means that if too many people try to cook a certain dish, it might not turn out very good. And the other saying is "Many hands make light work," which means if a whole bunch of people work on the same thing, it makes the job easier. So interestingly in English, we have both phrases and you can use whichever one you want, depending on the situation.
Hey, surprisingly, I don't have a lot to talk about for the last minute of this video. I'm usually quite a talkative person. Usually, I talk about all kinds of things, but just today, it felt like a really long day. So maybe I'll talk about that for a bit. I taught all of my classes. One of my classes was maybe a little louder than normal, and I had to talk louder than normal to kind of keep control. But overall, the students worked hard and were learning things.