Call off
Here’s a phrasal verb for you: “call off.” Do you know what it means to “call something off”? It means to cancel it or postpone it. And we usually use “call off” when we’re talking about plans or events.
Sporting events may be called off due to weather or other factors
The Olympics have been called off. They were a big event, big plans, and now they are not going forward. In this case, they will happen a year from now. So the Games have been called off for now. Hopefully in a year, things will be back to normal. The Olympics are not the only major sporting event to have been called off this year. We talked about all the big sporting events that were canceled or postponed. Even more events were called off since then, including the Wimbledon tennis tournament in London.
It’s April and it tends to be rainy where I live. It’s dangerous to plan things outside for April. If it rains or if it’s too cold, you might have to call things off. You might have plans to play golf on the weekend. If so, and if it’s too cold, you might have to call your plans off. “Weren’t you supposed to play golf today?” your spouse might ask. “Yes, but we had to call it off. It’s too cold outside.” That means you had to cancel your plans.
Baseball games are often called off due to weather this time of year. If it’s raining too hard, they can’t play. These games aren’t canceled; they are simply delayed. They’re played on another day. But we still say “the game was called off due to weather.” The game was delayed.
‘Call off’ can be used with weddings and investments
Do you know what sometimes gets called off? Weddings. The couple got into a huge fight and the bride called off the wedding at the last minute. That’s not good, but it happens. It’s better to call off a wedding than get married if it’s going to be a mistake, right? If someone calls off a wedding, it leads to some awkward questions. If the bride calls off the wedding, she probably should return the ring. But if the groom calls off the wedding, he probably can’t expect to get the ring back.
Japanese investor SoftBank was supposed to invest another $3 billion in the struggling office rental company, WeWork. WeWork was supposed to do several things by April 1, and SoftBank says they didn’t do those things. So SoftBank called off the deal. The canceled the deal: they will no longer invest the additional $3 billion they had planned to invest.
Call off means that you cancel something you decided to do
I want you to notice that there’s a difference between calling something off and simply deciding not to do something. In all of these examples with “call off,” the decision had been made to do something, and that decision was then reversed. Tokyo had decided to host the Olympics. You decided to play golf on the weekend. The happy couple decided to get married. SoftBank decided to invest $3 billion in WeWork. But something happened to cause the planned event to not happen after all. When circumstances change and force you to cancel plans, that’s when you use “call off.”
There are a couple of other ways to use “call off,” which we might explore in future lessons, but in this sense it means, to cancel something that had been planned.
Quote of the week
We talked a while ago about how to stay in balance, mentally, during these difficult coronavirus times. We all have to adapt to a new reality—a temporary new reality for now, but possibly a permanently changed reality in the future. Part of the adjustment is sleep schedules. If you’re like me, your sleep might be better now than it was before, without having to worry about getting up too early to commute into work.
However, your sleep might be worse, depending on your situation. If you’re worried about friends and family, if you’ve lost a job, if you’re concerned about the future, then you might find it harder to sleep. And the less you sleep, the harder it will be to focus on doing good work or being a good parent the next day. That’s why it’s so important to stay in balance mentally; it can really affect your sleep if you’re not.
This is a long-winded introduction to this week’s quote, which is from the author Charlotte Bronte. She says, “A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.”
“A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.” Ruffled is like, unsettled. Not calm. And a pillow here is a metaphor for your ability to sleep. So if you have an unsettled mind, a lot of unresolved turmoil, then it’s bound to affect your sleep. And indeed I have found that my ability to get good sleep is always affected by my stress level at work and in my personal life. The less stress, the better I’m able to sleep. So indeed I find this quote by Charlotte Bronte to be true, “A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.”
Live events on Zoom
I mentioned before that we’re going to do live events on Zoom. We’ve had several so far and they’ve been a huge success. If you haven’t yet had a chance to join one of our live calls on Zoom, you can see the schedule by visiting PlainEnglish.com/live. And I decided, as I was writing this lesson, that we should take a break from talking about coronavirus. So I scheduled one that’s going to be all about the electronics we grew up with. That one will be this Thursday, April 16.
If you missed it, that’s okay. Check out PlainEnglish.com/live anyway because that’s where we’ll be posting the dates and times of future calls. PlainEnglish.com/live.
Thanks for being with us again for episode 250. It’s a big one for us, not just because it’s a round number. I can’t tell you exactly why this is a big day for us—I want to tell you, but JR won’t let me. I’ll be able to share more in a few weeks. In the meantime, I do want to say that I am thrilled that you are here, and so very grateful that you are making Plain English part of your routine.
Use realistic expressions like a native speaker
