Come as a surprise
Now I’m going to show you a really common English expression—“come as a surprise.” If something is unexpected, it comes as a surprise.
I’ll show you three ways of using this expression today. Let’s start with the basic way of using it. You’ll want to talk about an event and say that it “comes as a surprise” or it “came as a surprise.”
For example, you can say: “The CEO’s resignation”—that’s the event—“The CEOs’ resignation came as a surprise, since he was relatively young and had no plans to retire.” That means, the CEO’s resignation surprised people. So you can say it came as a surprise.
After the pandemic, many economists were worried that the economy would suffer a sharp recession. But the post-pandemic growth and the post-pandemic inflation came as a surprise. You might even remember leading economists—including central bank economists—saying that inflation was temporary . That was before they started raising interest rates. They were surprised by the inflation. The inflation came as a surprise.
So that’s the first way. You start with a noun or a noun phrase, often an event: the CEO’s resignation, the post-pandemic inflation, and then you say, came as a surprise.
The second way to use “come as a surprise” is very, very similar. In this case, we use it with actions. You say, “it came as a surprise that…” or “it came as a surprise when…” and then you say the action that’s surprising. So we’re using verbs here.
Today I told you all about the theory that whales started to get really big after they developed filter feeding systems, so they could ingest food just by swimming around—or even by staying still in moving waters. Really old whales—tens of millions of years ago—they didn’t have these systems, so they couldn’t get really big.
It came as a surprise when researchers discovered (there’s the verb)—it came as a surprise when researchers discovered a really big whale that lived 39 million years ago. That wasn’t supposed to be possible! It came as a surprise because—up until now—scientists thought that whales only got really big relatively recently.
You guys know, if you’ve been listening for a while, that I worked in business consulting for over fifteen years. I was somewhat good at it, but I also wanted to try my hand at something else. You can imagine that I didn’t tell a whole lot of people at work that I had already started this business—Plain English—on the side.
So it came as a surprise to my colleagues that I left my massive consulting firm and instead started a very small business. People were surprised by that. It came as a surprise that I left my career in consulting—it was surprising because I hadn’t told many people at work about my plans.
So you can say, “it came as a surprise that” or “it came as a surprise when” plus some type of action.
Now the last way I’ll show you is a little more complicated. This is a way of saying that something is logical or expected, that someone should anticipate something, or someone should have anticipated something. And you say that something “should not come as a surprise” or “it should not come as a surprise that..” plus an event or action.
For example, you can say: “Elon Musk’s decision to re-name Twitter should not have come as a surprise. He has always criticized Twitter’s branding and he loves the letter X.” That means, you should not have been surprised about his decision to re-name Twitter. You should have anticipated it. His decision to re-name Twitter should not have come as a surprise.
You can also say, “It should not come as a surprise that…” and then an action or event that you think should be anticipated or expected. You can say, “It should not come as a surprise that she passed the exam on her first try. She has been studying for months.”
See you next time!
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