ADVANCED PHRASAL VERBS WITH FASCINATING ORIGINS! 🤯 ADVANCED ENGLISH VOCABULARY | C1 PHRASAL VERBS

hello everyone thank you for joining me again and welcome to any new viewers this is to the point english with ben i'm ben and today i have a phrasal verb video for you now one of the biggest challenges that english teachers like myself face when teaching phrasal verbs is how to make them interesting because people are much more likely to remember something if they find it interesting but i made a another video on phrasal verbs recently which i'll link to in the description where i look at how to learn phrasal verbs through time travel now what i meant by that was just by simply looking at the origin of some phrasal verbs which can help you really understand where they come from and many people seem to find that video very useful and interesting so i thought i'd make another one with some more phrasal verbs so in this video you're going to learn five advanced phrasal verbs and their fascinating origins well i think they're fascinating anyway so the first phrasal verb we're going to look at today is quite a funny one and it's to butter up or ready to butter someone up and this means to be overly kind or friendly to someone in order to get them to do something for you so this is very common when a child wants their parents to do something for them or a school kid wants their teacher to give them good marks or maybe just someone wants their friend to do something and they don't want to ask them to directly they sort of prepare them by being this excessively nice person to them so the example i have is there's no point trying to butter up the examiners they're very professional and impartial so you can imagine in your cambridge english exam you finish the speaking paper and as you're walking out the room you say to the examiner you're the best examiner i've ever had so you're trying to butter them up to make them like you and give you a better mark and this phrasal verb has a very interesting origin now it actually comes from india so traditionally in india the devout people the religious people would throw balls of butter at statues of their gods in order to get favor from the gods so that the gods like them and and help them out in their lives and so now of course with the colonial connection from britain and and india uh it's it's quite common phrasal verbs you use in colloquial situations but yeah it's a pretty interesting origin and the next phrasal verb is to egg on so it sounds quite similar to butter up right you have a food used as a verb so to butter to butter up to egg to egg on um and with a preposition but this is quite different to egg on means to encourage someone to do something usually something bad or something that you shouldn't do and the example is i didn't want to cheat in the exam but my friends egged me on so egged that's a regular past form exit neon so of course you shouldn't cheat in exams it's something bad you shouldn't do it but in this case this person's friends egged them on they encouraged them they urged them to do to do this bad act so as i said having heard the origin of butter up you may think that aegon is similar maybe uh people would throw eggs at other people to to encourage them to do something but no that's not the case with this with this phrasal verb ergon uh in fact aegon actually has nothing to do with eggs it's not from the word egg it's from an old norse word dating back to the 1500s so it's a word that has been used for hundreds of years which is egya i'm not sure if i'm pronouncing that that well because we don't use that word in modern english um but it's something like that and that means to incite or to provoke someone so you can see where it's come from how it's developed over the years and it's just a coincidence that it looks very much like egg and in modern english it's the same word but a very different meaning okay let's move on to number three now brush up on you may be familiar with this one i'm not sure but to brush up on is to improve your existing knowledge of something previously learned so it's something you know so it's not something that's completely new to you but if you brush up on it it means you sort of revise it and improve your knowledge so that it's it's better and fresher in your mind so the example sentence is if you want to pass the c1 advanced exam you must brush up on your grammar so this isn't to learn all new grammar it's just to brush up on it to improve your existing knowledge so maybe go through your old notes that you have from school as i always recommend in previous videos if you're going to take the cambridge english exams but yeah just to improve your knowledge so the origin of this word uh again i think it's interesting it's um to brush up something more literally less figuratively like in the phrasal verb it's to improve the appearance of a fabric um or or suede for example so by brushing up the nap so you have a suede shoe the nap is the the surface the the little hairs and threads that go in one direction and if you if you brush up the shoe for example then you're you're making it look new and improving the appearance in general so that's again quite a literal meaning of to brush up but over the years it's developed and taken on this more figurative use um to improve your existing knowledge of something okay the next one to clam up now unfortunately we've all probably experienced this at some time in our lives especially when speaking a second language because to climb up is to become silent or stop talking because you're nervous or embarrassed about the subject as i said that's very common when you're speaking a second language it's happened to me in spanish i'm sure it's happened to you in english or any other language you may speak and it's also very common in exams i mean in the speaking paper of exams people are always nervous most people get nervous and it's a very pressured intense situation so some people climb up they just stop speaking they can't think of something to say or they just they're so nervous they can't express themselves the thing i worry about most is climbing up in the speaking paper of the exam so this person is a little bit stressed about taking the exam because they think that at some point in the speaking paper they're just going to get so nervous they're going to find it difficult to speak i mean it doesn't only happen in exams it can happen in other situations obviously we get nervous in other situations where we have to speak but often when it's a second language and very often in exams allow the origin again another interesting origin now many of you may know that clam is a little shellfish that closes its shell when it's when it feels attacked so like when it gets nervous i guess so it closes tight and it's very difficult to open so you can see why we use it in this context you close your mouth and you can't open your mouth because you clam up it just shuts and you can't finish what you're saying or you can't express yourself as you would like and the last phrasal verb today is to boil down to now boiled down to refers to the most important aspect or essence of something so when you're talking about a particular subject maybe you have a lot of opinions or a lot of ideas but when you say it boils down to something then that's really the essence the most important the the fundamental part of whatever this this conversation is about or whatever the subject is so the example good exam preparation really boils down to knowing the format of the exam doing sample papers and revising the grammar and vocabulary so that's just the essence those are the most important parts of preparation there are lots of other things lots of other peripheral things that you can you can do to help yourself pass an exam but what it boils down to are those three aspects that i mentioned so what is the origin of this phrasal verb well you've probably guessed it haven't you um and this is really a good way to learn phrasal verbs in general from common sense boil you probably know it means it's a way to cook so when the water is at 100 degrees it boils so that's how you cook many things and boil down to so it's to reduce something so when you're boiling vegetables for example in water you boil down so the water evaporates to nothing or to very little and then all you have is the main ingredients of the dish you're going to cook so the vegetables or all the meat whatever your whatever you're boiling so again that's more literal but as a figurative phrasal verb you're reducing to the essential parts the essential ingredients of whatever it is you're talking about whatever it is whatever the subject is that you're you're referring to so do you know any phrasal verbs with interesting origins or perhaps you have a favorite phrasal verb that you'd like to know the origin of if people have favorite phrasal verbs that's probably not a thing is it anyway i hope you found this video useful hit the like button if you did and i'll see you very soon for another video take care bye [Music] you

Channel: To The Point English with Ben.

Views: 2,461

Keywords: phrasal verbs, advanced phrasal verbs, phrasal verbs c1 cambridge, c1 phrasal verbs lesson, c1 advanced vocabulary, c1 advanced phrasal verbs, english phrasal verbs in use advanced, phrasal vebs for c1 advanced cambridge english exam, phrasal verbs for c2 proficiency cambridge, c1 advanced cambridge english exam, c1 advanced cambridge english phrasal verbs, c1 advanced exam phrasal verbs, useful vocabulary for cambridge english exams, how to learn phrasal verbs easily, ben gill

Id: m4PM9AipgLw

Length: 9min 57sec (597 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 18 2021