Cool off

Cool off

Now it’s time to learn the English expression “cool off.”

Cool off refers to lowering the temperature, either of your body or of the atmosphere. It has to be your body or the atmosphere. If you take a warm soda and put it in the freezer, you can’t use “cool off.”

If it’s a hot day, and you’re feeling warm, you might want to jump in the pool to cool off. You do this because your body temperature is high. You’re feeling warm, it’s a hot day. You jump in the pool, and you immediately feel better. You feel cooler, your body temperature starts to fall, you feel better. You’re cooling off.

What else can you do to cool off in the summer? I was just in Las Vegas and there are outdoor restaurants that spray a constant layer of mist over the tables. That helps clients cool off in the summer heat. And the summer heat was intense at ten o’clock at night. Even when it was dark out, you almost needed to cool off if you spent too much time outside. So the restaurants and bars had these misters, they would spray mist over the whole area to help us cool off.

If you don’t have air conditioning at home, which might be the case for many of you experiencing a heat wave right now, well if you don’t have AC at home and if you find yourself in a heat wave, you might be going to a lot of matinee movies. In the hottest time of the day, you can go to a movie theater to cool off. Or just walk around the mall. I know people who do that, if they don’t have air conditioning at home and a heat wave hits. This is all about cooling your body temperature.

Pets can cool off. Pets—dogs especially —they always find the spot in the house that’s the coolest. There might be only a triangle of shade in a room, but that’s where you’ll find a dog in the summertime. If you have carpet or hardwood floors, and it’s summertime, you’ll find a dog spending a lot of time in the bathroom. The human bathroom. Why? The floor is probably tile or stone—and they lie there to cool off. The tile or stone helps them cool off, it helps them feel less hot in the summer weather.

The other way to use “cool off” is with the weather. And when we talk about the weather in English, we use the word “it.” It’s raining; it’s snowing; it’s hot out; it’s cold out. Same with cool off: “It’s starting to cool off.” That means, the temperature in the atmosphere is starting to fall, after being hot for a while.

That’s the key. It has to start hot, and then get cooler. You never say this in the winter. You never say this if the temperature goes from cool to cold, or from cold to colder. No. You only say this when it goes from hot to less hot. It’s starting to cool off.

I can’t wait for it to cool off. You would say that if it’s been really hot for a couple of weeks and you’re just ready for lower temperatures. The weatherman says it’s going to cool off by Thursday. Whatever.

And this is how I used it in today’s lesson about the heat domes that the world is experiencing this year . In a normal weather pattern, a high pressure system comes in. It’s clear and warm for a while. But then the jet stream brings a lower pressure system to your area. When there’s lower pressure, clouds come in and it rains and it cools off. It cools off—the temperature goes from high to less high.

See you next time!

That’s all for today’s Plain English. This was lesson 596, so you can find the full lesson transcript and all the resources at PlainEnglish.com/596. We’ll be back on Thursday with a new lesson.

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