Hello and welcome to learn English with Jojo this
is the second video in my series about English idioms and this idiom is going
to be out of the blue. I'm first going to give you a definition then a couple
examples and I'm going to talk about how often it's used in English and American
usage versus British usage and some interesting stuff like that so let's get
started. Out of the blue basically means saying or doing something out of context
or without precedent or something random so my first example is: He started
talking to me about George W Bush's painting career out of the blue so that
means we were talking about something else or we weren't even talking and then
he just brought up george bush's painting career out of the blue out of
nowhere. It's the same expression and George W. Bush is a pretty good painter
that's why i picked this one so basically what out of the blue ... where it
comes from is we're going to imagine a blue sky and then suddenly it starts
raining or thundering or there's lightning so we're expecting a beautiful
day because we see the sky is blue and then out of the blue comes a storm comes
a hurricane comes a tornado I don't know any sort of weather event so the second
example is: She started frantically waving her arms out of the blue so she
was doing nothing before or we were talking or we were sitting on the couch
and then she started waving her arms frantically out of nowhere, out of the
blue. So those are two examples. Now I'm going to talk about how often it is used
in English and the differences between the usage in American English and
British English and to do that I'm using Google's Ngram search and what it does
is it searches a lot of books not exactly sure how many and it finds
how often a word or a phrase is used in those books so it's not going to be
perfect we're going to have to make the assumption that what is written in books
is what is said out loud in spoken English but I think it's a pretty...
it's... it's an okay assumption let's go with that
so let's look at the chart four out of the blue in American English so you can
see it's pretty constant and it it's going up exponentially and at nineteen
seventy it really starts going up and it's used fairly often right now today
so let's look at the British usage so you can see it goes up and then actually
takes a dip at nineteen seventy and then goes up to about the same level as it is
in American English I think it's point zero zero zero zero
one less so it's a little bit less used in British English than American English
and for my videos I'm going to try to bring you idioms that are used more
frequently in American English than British English that's the goal and then
let's compare it to the last idiom that I covered let's compare it to
off the cuff. As you can see out of the blue is used almost ten times as much as
out off off the cuff which is somewhat interesting so I'm going to try to find
you idioms that are pretty common and I'm going to be using Google Ngram to do
that and my knowledge as a native speaker and yeah I hope you enjoyed this
video, I hope it was interesting, please let me know if you like the format if
you think there are things I should change, add, subtract from the videos I'm
going to always try to improve them and I hope you're having a great day, see you
next week for our video in French and then a video in English and I don't know
if that will be an idiom video maybe I'll do idiom videos once a month that
sounds like a good amount so if you have any
for idioms that you're confused about that you would like explanation please
let me know in the comments okay bye.
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