A crack at
Today’s expression is “a crack at.” To have a crack at, to get a crack at something is to have the opportunity to achieve a goal or solve a problem.
Imagine you’re in the kitchen and you’re cooking up a great meal. You need to open a jar, but your hands aren’t dry and you can’t get the jar open. How embarrassing! You can ask someone else, “Can you take a crack at getting this jar open?” You can ask someone else, can you try to achieve the goal? Can you try to open it up?
Have you ever had a crack at a piñata? A piñata is a decorated figure of an animal or something; it’s popular in Mexico. It’s made of paper mâché and there are toys and candy inside. You hang it from a tree. And the children (or adults!) swing a broomstick or something and try to break it. When it breaks, the toys and candy fall to the ground and everyone rushes in to get some.
Usually it goes like this. The first person to take a crack at the piñata swings really hard and doesn’t break it. After one or two attempts, someone else gets a crack at it. Someone else gets the opportunity to solve the problem, or, in this case, break open the piñata. After everyone at the party has a crack at the piñata, if it’s still intact, then the first person can take another crack at it. And so on.
“Take another crack at it” means try to do it a second time. That happened to me recently. I got a new computer for Plain English work and I was so proud of myself, I recorded my first-ever video on this new computer. And then , I listened to the audio. There was this ever-present humming in the background. JR could edit it out of this video, but this was a problem I needed to solve.
So I took a crack at figuring out the solution; I tried to figure out what was causing the background noise. No luck. I was out of ideas and really frustrated. But I went to bed and took another crack at it the next day. I tried again to solve the problem, and on my second attempt, I figured it out.
In today’s lesson, we were talking about the time the James Webb Space Telescope almost got cancelled . It was late and over budget. I said that the U.S. House of Representatives gets the first crack at the annual budget bills, and in 2011, the House’s version of the budget cut funding from the Webb telescope.
What do I mean, the House of Representatives gets the first crack at the budget? Well, under our Constitution, all spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives. They must pass both houses of Congress and be signed by the president. However, they start with the House of Representatives. So that means the House of Representatives gets the first crack at writing the budget. They get the first attempt at achieving the goal. The final version will be different. But the House of Representatives gets the first crack at it, they get the first attempt.
JR’s song of the week
Time for the song of the week. Today it’s “Santa Monica” by Everclear. Santa Monica is a small city in California, west of downtown Los Angeles, bordering the Pacific Ocean. If you’ve been to LA, you’ve probably been on Santa Monica Boulevard, which goes through Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and ends in downtown Santa Monica on the beach.
Anyway, the song was written by the lead singer, Art Alexakis. And he grew up in Santa Monica and he used images from his town, the palm trees, the breakers, the coast. And he used those images as a safe haven, he said, to escape bad times you might have elsewhere. Familiar images of home can be comforting if you’re a long way away and are having a bad experience.
See you next time!
That does it for today’s Plain English. 493, today was, and that means we’re getting closer and closer to number 500. Just as a reminder, our five-hundredth lesson celebration is coming right up.
We are going to be doing a live video stream of Lesson number 500, and we’ll be doing it on Saturday, September 3. It will be on Facebook and Instagram. I have never live streamed anything before, but I’ll take a crack at it. I’ll try it. We’ll do a practice run a week or two before. But the live stream of the five hundredth lesson will be on September 3. It will be at 8 o’clock in the morning here in Chicago, 10 a.m. in Brazil, that is afternoon in Europe and evening Asia, so everyone has a chance to be a part of it.
Your job right now is to go to PlainEnglish.com/500 to get ready for the celebration. There will be prizes, giveaways, the live stream, and the chance to be part of the five-hundredth episode video that we are making. It’s going to be so much fun, and I can’t wait to include you all in the celebration. So remember, PlainEnglish.com/500 right now!
We’ll be back again next Monday. See you then.
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