Brace yourself

Brace yourself

Brace yourself—that’s the English phrase I’m going to tell you about today. It’s a good one. It means, prepare yourself for a disaster. Literally it means to cross your arms in front of you to protect yourself from danger. If you’re in a car—I hope this never happens—but if you’re a passenger in a car and you think there’s going to be a crash soon, you might brace yourself by hiding your head behind your arms.

But in common use, brace yourself just means—uh oh, something bad is coming. Prepare yourself. It could be physical or it could just be anything unpleasant. So here’s how you heard it originally. If you think that robots or machines could never make a real chef-inspired dish, that you really need a highly-trained, highly-skilled person to do that—brace yourself, because a company in London is training a machine to cook from a recipe book of 2,000 dishes. Get ready—the day where machines take over the kitchen is coming. Brace yourself.

So when Andrea goes home next time and strolls into her mom’s kitchen or her nonna’s kitchen, the aroma of fresh marinara sauce in the air, and casually says, “Hey, I don’t know why you’re making all these delicious recipes by hand—you know in America they have robots that can do this all a lot faster,” she’ll need to brace herself for what comes next. Right? Prepare yourself for the coming disaster.

When it’s 5 a.m. in Washington, DC, and the American president’s Twitter account starts lighting up with tweets—brace yourself! You never know what it’s going to be, but just brace yourself.

Or you’re sitting in an English pub in London, sipping a Guinness, digging into your fish and chips, trying to forget the terrible sequence of events that led to your football team placing third in the World Cup, and then an unruly band of French fans marches into the pub, all in high spirits, and they order a round of Kronenbourg to celebrate their victory at the World Cup. Brace yourself!

Thanks for listening to today’s Plain English. Remember we’re here every Monday and Thursday, and listening for 15 minutes twice a week is great practice whether you’re commuting in the car, on the bus, maybe working out at the gym, or just getting some time alone at home after everyone else goes to bed. Wherever and whenever you listen, it’s great to have each and every one of you with us. JR and I will be back on Thursday.