Creep closer
This is a funny one: creep closer. To creep is to move your body slowly, kind of close to the ground. A spider creeps across a room. If you creep up on someone, you move slowly and quietly to surprise the person.
Creep closer is related. You can use this literally: something slowly moves closer to something else. A toddler might be afraid to go down the stairs. But he might be curious. So he might creep closer to the edge of the stairs. He crawls, slowly, curiously, right up to the edge. A cat might creep closer to a mouse, slowly moving, close to the ground, little by little, getting closer.
You can use “creep closer” with things that are not living. Let’s say you build a sandcastle on the beach in low tide. That means the edge of the water is farther out. The tide, a few hours later, will creep closer to your sandcastle. Every wave might get just a teeny tiny bit closer to your sandcastle, until the tide overwhelms it. The tide can creep closer to your sandcastle.
If you’re in a flooded area, the water in the street might creep closer to your front door. That’s a scary feeling. The water line gets a little closer, inch by inch, toward your door.
But very, very often, we use “creep closer” to talk about a date or an event in the future that gradually seems or feels closer as time goes on. This is ironic because the thing in the future is not moving. We are the ones moving through time! But still, we say the thing in the future is creeping closer. It makes no sense, I know, but that’s what we say.
I used to work in consulting and we’d do projects. And each project would have a deadline. And when we started the project, the deadline often seemed far away, like six weeks away. That’s forever! We have plenty of time!
But then, as the deadline crept closer, we would start to feel the pressure. It feels and seems closer—because it is closer. Every day that went by, the deadline was one day closer, it was creeping closer. Kind of like, the deadline was the cat and we were the mouse! So after four weeks…we’d say, “yikes, we have only 14 days left! The deadline is creeping closer, so we have to be efficient in our work.”
Sometimes things are in the future, but we don’t know exactly when they will arrive. The age of flying cars—almost since the invention of the car, people have fantasized about flying cars . I think there’s a general sense that this will happen someday; we just don’t know when.
But things are happening today and now it’s possible to imagine what the age of the flying car will be like. Flying cars exist. The vehicles exist. Governments are studying the regulations. They were almost approved for the Paris Olympics. And one government—Dubai—has already approved a flying taxi company to operate in 2026. So the age of the flying car is not here yet, but it is creeping closer. It feels closer.
What day will it arrive? Will it be 2026? I don’t know exactly. But it sure feels a lot closer now than it felt two, three, four years ago. And that’s why I say that the age of flying cars is creeping closer.
See you next time!
The end of this Plain English audio lesson is creeping closer. Just a minute or two left, and the audio will go silent on Spotify, your podcast player, or on the website, wherever you listen. The end of this episode is creeping closer.
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So even though the end of this episode is creeping closer—it is! It’s even closer now than it was before—even though the end of the audio is creeping closer, you can continue to work on English with us at PlainEnglish.com/684, all thanks to our producer, JR.
We’ll be back on Thursday with a new story and a new expression—see you then.
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