Bob's Short English Lessons Learn the English Phrases BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION and THE FINAL STRETCH
Read along to practice your English and to learn the English phrase BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION and THE FINAL STRETCH
In this English lesson, I wanted to help you learn the English phrase, "by any stretch of the imagination." Now, your imagination is when you use your mind to think about things, to imagine things. When you say something in the negative, and then you add the phrase, by any stretch of the imagination, you're just emphasizing the point. I better give some examples. Let's say there's a team that's not very good at soccer. They're not a very good football team. You could say they are not a good team by any stretch of the imagination. So no matter how you think about that team, they are a bad team. So we used this phrase to emphasize that. I used it I think in the other day where I said, I'm not rich by any stretch of imagination. This simply means that I am not someone that has lots of money in the bank. So in order to emphasize that, I add the phrase, by any stretch of the imagination. I'll use this phrase at the end of this video, or when I reply to the comment too, you'll see.
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The other phrase I wanted to teach you today is the phrase, "the final stretch." Whenever you do something and you only have a few days or weeks or months left, when you're at the, kind of close to the end, you might say that you're in the final stretch. Right now at school, we have about two and a half months left, so the school year is about 10 months long. I feel like we're in the final stretch right now. We're in the last part of the school year. Just a few more weeks, pretty soon it'll be May, and then it'll be June, and before you know it, the students will be writing exams and the school year will be over, so I feel like we're in the final stretch.
So to review, when you use the phrase, by any stretch of the imagination, it's used to emphasize a negative point. That's not a very nice car by any stretch of the imagination. You would be emphasizing that it's not a nice car. And when you say that you are in the final stretch of something, it means that you're in the last part. When I get close to the four-minute mark when I'm making these lessons, I'm in the final stretch of the lesson.
But hey, let's look at a comment from a previous video. This comment is from Parkash. Nice weather and nice video too. And my reply was it was a beautiful day. Not like today. Today, the weather is miserable.
So I would say that it's not a nice day by any stretch of the imagination. That was the part where I was going to use that phrase. Right now, it's kind of strange out here. It is warm, but it's really, really windy. I'm not sure if you can see it. I actually, I think it's calmed down a bit since I started making the video, but this tree was just moving in the wind like crazy earlier. And it's spitting rain a little bit.
The ground is sopping wet. I don't know if I've ever used that phrase before. When you say the ground is sopping wet, it means it's rained a lot. I am wearing my rubber boots again because the ground is sopping wet today. It's certainly a miserable day out here, not the nicest day in the world, but still, not a bad day to make a video compared to way back in January when it was snowy and lots of wind and freezing cold and my hands would, it would feel like my hands were freezing off.