Catch on
Today we’re going to focus on the phrasal verb “catch on.” Competitive video gaming is catching on in the United States; it’s becoming popular. eSports caught on in South Korea years ago; they built their first eSports arena in 2005. I’m not sure why it took so long to catch on in the United States.
In some ways, competitive video gaming reminds me of professional poker. In the early 2000s, people here in the United States were crazy for poker. I’m not sure what caused poker to catch on here, but it was popular to play in person and online. You could even watch poker tournaments on television. Did that trend ever catch on in your country? Was poker ever that popular where you live? Even though poker caught on pretty quickly—even though it became popular quickly—it didn’t stay popular for long. I wonder if the same thing will happen with eSports.
The other way you can use “catch on” is to say someone is starting to understand something. When I started researching this episode, I had no idea why people would watch video games played by other people. But after a few minutes, I started to catch on; I started to understand. The games are shown from a variety of camera angles, just like regular sports. And the participants can often play those same games at home—also, kind of like more traditional sports like soccer. If you were a skeptic at first, are you starting to catch on, now, too? Are you starting to see why it’s popular?
So, remember: if something catches on, it means it becomes popular; but when a person catches on to something, it means that person is beginning to understand.
That’s it for today’s episode. I send out an email every Monday and Thursday morning with a summary of the new Plain English episode and links to one or two articles that I used to prepare the show. So, if anything really catches your interest and you want to read more about a particular topic in English, you can just follow that link for more. I also put an explanation of one more word or phrase in each episode. If you want to get these additional resources, head over to PlainEnglish.com/mail and sign up.
Thanks again for listening—we’ll be back on Thursday with another episode. See you then.
Use realistic expressions like a native speaker
