Fall behind

Fall behind

“Fall behind” or “fall behind on” means to be slower than expected or to not keep up with peers or competitors. You use this to describe someone or something that’s not going as fast as others, or not going as fast as it should go.

A good way to imagine this is in a race. Imagine you have five runners in a race. When the race starts, everyone runs fast together. But after a few minutes, you see one runner pulling ahead; she’s running faster than everyone else. Three runners are running together at a good pace. But you see one runner falling behind. The runner that’s falling behind is running slower than the others. He’s falling behind; he’s not keeping up with the others. He’s last, he’s slower than the others, slower than the average, he’s not where he wants or needs to be.

A common way to use this is to say that someone is falling behind in school. School is a great example of a situation where everyone is expected to progress together, more or less at the same pace. We know this is not a perfect system; everyone learns differently. But broadly, students are classified by age, by grade level, and everyone is expected to hit certain milestones, certain objectives, as they progress in school.

So if a child falls behind at school, that child is not learning at the same pace as the other students. The other students are going faster, but this one student—the one that’s falling behind—he is learning more slowly. He’s falling behind at school. He’s not progressing at the speed that he’s expected to. You can get more specific and say a student is falling behind in math or falling behind in science. (That was me!)

Here’s a way to know if the economy is bad: how many people are falling behind on their car or credit card payments? If you fall behind on your payments, then you are not making your payments on time. That’s a sign that things are going wrong in the economy, right? If too many people are falling behind on their car payments, if they’re falling behind on rent, if they’re falling behind on credit card payments—if too many people are falling behind like that, then it’s bad news for the economy.

JR and I, we make two Plain English lessons per week. I write them and record them. JR produces them and uploads them to all our online services. We do this on a schedule, so that you always have new episodes on Mondays and Thursdays. But sometimes I fall a little behind. I don’t always keep up with the schedule.

If you were listening all the way back to lesson 630, then a lightbulb might have just gone off in your head. That’s when we talked about the phrasal verb “catch up .” And “catch up” is what you do if you fall behind. If you fall behind, if you’re slower or not making the progress you need to make, then you can try to “catch up”: you can do extra so that you’re back on schedule.

So if I fall behind on creating content, I catch up by writing an extra couple of lessons one week.

What’s another situation where you might fall behind? How about in a competition? There’s a competition to develop artificial intelligence. Google is the industry leader in search, free e-mail, and much else besides. But Google has fallen behind in artificial intelligence. Google is not keeping up with OpenAI , Microsoft, even Amazon. Google has fallen behind; it needs to catch up.

McDonald’s is known for its burgers. But a recent survey of consumers in the United States, its home market, showed that McDonald’s has fallen behind. Consumers ranked the company’s burgers thirteenth! Ouch. That’s not where they want to be. McDonald’s does not want to be the country’s thirteenth-favorite burger. Because they have fallen behind, the company launched its new burger strategy to improve the taste and consistency of McDonald’s burgers.

See you next time!

Here’s a common thing people tell me. Jeff, I’ve fallen behind on Plain English. I can’t keep up. And what I say to them is: don’t worry! You don’t have to listen to every single episode! It’s not a race. You go at your own pace. There’s no such thing as falling behind, getting ahead. Just do a little bit, it’s not a competition.

So if you feel like you’re falling behind on English, on this podcast, on anything else in English, don’t be so hard on yourself. It’s not a race.

All right on that note, we will say goodbye for today. I hope your 2024 is off to a great start. We will be back here on Monday with a new topic. See you then.