Get into gear

To get into gear

To get into gear, that’s today’s phrase. When you get into gear, you get moving. You get your act together. You start working or doing something in an energetic way. This morning, I slept kind of late, didn’t want to get up. But I had to get into gear to record a couple of episodes of Plain English before my flight. I might have been lazy getting up, but I soon got moving. I soon started to be productive, to work energetically on the task at hand.

India’s massive bureaucracy gets into gear come election time. Normally, the bureaucracy is lazy, inefficient, ineffective. They don’t get things done quickly. There’s a lot of finger-pointing: people blaming other people, avoiding responsibility. But when it comes time to run an election, they get into gear. They hike over mountains, canoe through crocodile-infested waters, whatever it takes to bring the polling machines to the most populated cities or the most remote villages in that vast country. They get into gear at election time.

Sometimes if you have a long-term project and you waste some time at the beginning, saying, ah—it’s not due for another month, I can wait. After you procrastinate for a while, it’s time to get into gear. It’s time to start for real.

Every November, all the shops get into gear for the Christmas holiday shopping season. They open earlier and close later; they run sales; lots of advertising; and their employees work extra shifts. The whole retail industry gets into gear around the middle of November for the end-of-year shopping season, at least here in the United States.

Sometimes you say kicking into gear. Today’s episode was about the Indian elections, but as I mentioned last week, the American election campaign is about to start. A lot of Democrats have announced they want to run against Donald Trump. The campaign is kind of quiet right now. We don’t know all the candidates who are running, and they’re all pretty low-key. A rally here, a media appearance there. But the election will really kick into gear after Labor Day in September. That’s when the primary campaign to be selected as the official Democratic candidate will really get into gear, with intense media coverage, fundraisers, rallies, all the hallmarks of our endless election campaigns here.

That’s all for us this week at Plain English. Don’t forget to send your song nominations to JR at [email protected]. Tell him a couple of your favorite songs in English and we’ll include them as part of the show going forward. I think that’ll be a lot of fun—we have some plans to create a special Plain English playlist on Spotify with all the songs we put together. We’re still working on that, but send your nominations now!

Thanks again for being with us. JR and I had a great weekend together last weekend, brainstorming all kinds of great ideas for the future of Plain English, and the song is just one of those ideas. I can’t wait to share some more of those ideas with you in the coming months. Have a great week and we’ll be right back here on Thursday.