Fight back

Fight back

Today’s English phrase is “fight back.” This one was JR’s idea—I actually didn’t consider this one at first, but after thinking about it a little bit, I realize now it’s a little different from the regular verb “fight.” So, let’s talk about how to use the term “fight back.”

Fight back is what someone does in response to an act of aggression. For example, if you and I come across each other on the street and I push you and start yelling, you can fight back against me; you can push me back and yell back at me. In this example, I started the fight, but you fought back against me, only after being provoked. Fight back, therefore, is the response to an initial provocation.

So now let’s review the original context. In the 1960s, Spain was ruled by a military dictatorship that prohibited the use of Basque language and restricted the distinctive Basque culture. That was the original offense. The ETA was an organization founded to fight back against the dictatorship, by staging terrorist attacks against the police. In this case, the first aggression was the government’s restriction on people’s freedoms in the Basque country; the response was that the ETA fought back.

You might also use “fight back” as a response to criticism. I had a situation like that at work in the last few weeks, where someone criticized something I did. Usually I can take constructive criticism well, but in that case, the criticism was not valid, so I fought back against it.

If you’ve been following the news from Nicaragua lately, you know that the people of that country fought back against the president’s plan to cut public pensions. The citizens fought back by protesting in the streets and toppling statues put up by the president’s wife. In this case, it was a good decision to fight back, since Daniel Ortega reversed his original decision to cut pensions after the protests.

This is the most common way to use fight back, but there are a few other ways to use fight back, which I’ll post on Twitter this week.

Thanks for listening today. I love hearing from listeners, so don’t be shy about sending me a note on Facebook or Twitter. The show’s user name on both those platforms is PlainEnglishPod. You can also send me an email directly to jeff [at] plainenglish.com. I like hearing what you are all up to and what your motivations are for learning English. I mentioned last week that I was in Mexico for work for a week. I love traveling to Latin America and speaking Spanish, but sometimes being there just reminds me about how much more work I still have to do. So, I searched for a bunch of Spanish-language podcasts to listen to on my commute to work in the coming weeks—just like what a lot of you do with Plain English.

We’ll be back on Thursday with a new episode. Thanks for listening.