Come out

Come out

Well, speaking of “come out”, that is actually the word we’re going to talk about in-depth today. Come out has at least eight, if not more, distinct meanings. I thought there were, like, one or two meanings, but after thinking about it and doing some research, I found that there are a lot of different ways to use this one phrasal verb. To avoid confusing you, I’ll try to explain just one or two ways of using it, similar to how I used it earlier in the show.

Voldemort: Origins of the Heir came out on January 13. You remember that this is the new Harry Potter movie, and you probably realized from the context that the movie was released on January 13. That’s a pretty easy use of come out; it’s not hard to understand what it means, but I wanted to share the range of ways you can use “come out” in this sense. You can use it to describe almost anything in the media. Books, movies, TV shows, newspaper articles—hey, even podcasts, right?

Plain English, as you know, is a podcast for English learners that comes out every Monday and Thursday. I’m about to finish watching season 5 of the Netflix show called Orange is the New Black, have you seen that one? When is season six going to come out? I think it’ll come out next year. I talked about the Fantastic Beasts movies; the second “Fantastic Beasts movie” is scheduled to come out in November 2018.

What other things can come out? A video game can come out. Actually, speaking of video games, a new movie based on the classic video game Mario Brothers is going to come out soon. You can say that the magazine GQ comes out every month, while the magazine Sports Illustrated comes out every week.

Now that you know “come out” in this sense, let me tell you about a close cousin, which is “release.” Warner Brothers is going to release the next Fantastic Beasts movie in November. I, as the creator of this podcast, release new episodes on Mondays and Thursdays. The episodes come out on Mondays and Thursdays. Netflix will release a new season of Orange is the New Black next year.

So now you can use both “come out” and release in a few different ways. Here they are, all with one example. The new Voldemort movie came out in January. The producers released it on YouTube. In the passive voice, you’d say the Voldemort movie was released on YouTube in January.

Phrasal verbs are hard, aren’t they? And remember, that’s just one of many, many ways to use “come out”! I don’t think I had a full appreciation for how hard phrasal verbs are until I started creating this podcast. Every time I think Spanish is hard to learn, I just remind myself that although they have the subjunctive, which is tough for me, thank God they don’t have phrasal verbs!

Thanks again for listening to Plain English. The next episode will come out on Thursday; I hope you’ll be with us. If you want to send a note to me about the show, you can reach me on Facebook and Twitter under the user name PlainEnglishPod and by e-mail at jeff [at] plainenglish.com. And don’t forget to click subscribe or follow, wherever you listen. Thanks again for listening; see you on Thursday.