Bow to pressure
The expression I have for you today is to bow to pressure. To bow to pressure. That means you give in to pressure. A person or an organization is putting pressure on you to do something; you initially resist it. You initially have a different opinion; you don’t want to do that thing. But eventually the pressure is too much. You either don’t have a choice or you just give in. You bow to the pressure.
Turkey’s election commission was in just this position. After Ekrem Imamoglu won the election to be Istanbul’s mayor with just 0.2% of the vote, the powerful AK party, the side that lost that election, started putting pressure on the election commission to nullify, or cancel, the election. Eventually, the pressure became so great that the election commission did as the party bosses in the AK wanted. The election commission bowed to the pressure.
Big companies sometimes bow to the pressure coming from their customers or from consumer groups. I remember recently, an airline announced plans to shrink the space between the seats even more. That announcement didn’t make their customers very happy; a lot of them went on social media to voice their displeasure. So the airline bowed to the pressure and reversed the plans. The seats are still pretty close together, though!
Here’s a headline I saw in a British magazine: “Will Jeremy Corbyn bow to the pressure on a second Brexit referendum?” Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of the Labour Party in the UK. A lot of people within his party are now calling for a second referendum on Brexit. You remember that’s what I think is the least-bad option. So far, none of the leading politicians in Britain wants to do that. But there is growing pressure on them to call a new vote. Will Jeremy Corbyn bow to the pressure on a second Brexit referendum? That’s the question the article was asking.
JR’s song of the week
The song of the week this week was nominated by Fernando from Porto Alegre, Brazil. It’s called “Learning to Fly” by Pink Floyd. Like most Pink Floyd songs, I wouldn’t recommend you try to make too much sense of the lyrics, but you certainly can try. There’s one phrase in the lyrics that I thought I’d share with you, and that is tongue-tied. Tongue-tied is when you just can’t speak or you really struggle to express your ideas. It happens to a lot of people when they’re forced to speak in public. They get tongue-tied. Anyway, that’s one of the expressions in the song “Learning to Fly” by Pink Floyd, nominated by Fernando in Brazil. JR is looking for some new songs! Please send him your nominations to [email protected].
That’s all for today. Thanks for joining us once again. I promised I’d give the WhatsApp number. I don’t have a WhatsApp group, but I do send out the occasional message. So if you’d like to connect on there, send me a note to +1 312 967 8757 . You might just get a pronunciation request from me someday, who knows.
We’ll be back on Monday. On Monday we’ll talk about the solar eclipse that streaked across Chile and Argentina, and I’ll tell you about the solar eclipse we had here in Chicago a few years back. That’s coming up on Monday, don’t miss it!
Use realistic expressions like a native speaker
