Get off the ground

Get off the ground

“Get off the ground.” I think my mom said that to me more than once when I was a kid. Probably in public, like maybe in the grocery store. Get off the ground! But that’s not how we’re going to talk about it today.

When a project “gets off the ground” the project finally starts to get some momentum. It goes from the idea phase to the reality phase. When does something start to become real? When is it really happening? When is it no longer just talk, no longer just planning?

This comes from aviation. Think about a plane. The plane is taxiing around the runway. Are you on a flight right then? No, you’re just riding around in an airplane on the ground. When the airplane gets in the air—now you’re really on your way. Now you’re off the ground.

You guys know I moved to Mexico—now ten months ago. This move was in the idea phase for a long time! I thought about it, and thought about it, and—this is typical of me—I turned it over and over in my head. I had to get excited about it. What was my life going to be like? What kind of budget would I need? Where would I live? What would I do with all my stuff in Chicago?

I even came down here for a month just to see how well I’d like it. I probably thought about it for six months, maybe more.

But then I put my apartment on the market—I put it up for sale. That’s when the move finally got off the ground. That’s when this move, for me, went from being just an idea to being reality.

Barbie. The movie was planned in 2009. This is 2023. So they started thinking about this fourteen years ago. Mattel had different partnerships with movie studies. But the project was stuck in the planning phase for a long time. Who would write it? Who would produce it? Who would own the rights? What would the basic plot be?

The planning phase took forever. But then they were ready. The movie got off the ground in 2018. That’s when they had an idea, they had producers, they had a plan, they had the money, and they started making the movie. Not planning it! Not arguing over it. Really making the movie. Doing the work to create the film. That started happening in 2018. That’s when the movie really got off the ground.

The key to using this is, you need to be talking about something that has a planning phase and has an execution phase. You don’t use this with something spontaneous. You don’t use this with something easy.

What is the second-most-popular sport in the world? Five…four…three…tw—it’s cricket. If you didn’t know it right way, you weren’t going to guess correctly. The second-most-popular sport in the world is cricket, with over 2.5 billion fans. Very few of them are in the United States.

But in 2018, USA Cricket, which runs the national teams for competition, they announced they wanted a professional cricket league in the U.S. by 2021. Now, it took a while. It took a while for them to raise money, plan the league, where would the teams be, where would they get players from, how many games, what time of year, where it would it happen, all that stuff.

Well, it finally got off the ground in May 2022 when they secured about $120 million in investment. They planned the first tournament. This is when it became real. It was a lot of fun to plan and talk, but only in May 2022 did they get the money, and then they could start to execute. That’s when it finally got off the ground.

And then this year, they had their first “season,” which ran for a little over two weeks. The team from New York won by seven wickets. What does that mean? Your guess is as good as mine.

See you next time!

And that’s all for today’s Plain English. Now listen, do we deserve a break? I think we do. Six hundred lessons! We produce them fifty-two weeks a year. So we deserve a break. Now a break at Plain English just means we take our foot off the gas a little. So the next two or three lessons will be shorter, easier ones. And that will let our fantastic team—and I mean, our fantastic team—get ahead on their work so that they can take a week off at the end of the summer.

So call it Plain English summer break. We’ll still have episodes, but they’ll be quicker, easier to consume. And you guys, you lucky ducks, as you’re on your own vacations, you get to enjoy an easier week of English. How about that? Win-win, right?

All right, so that’s all for today, Monday, August 21. Summer is coming to an end, here in the Northern Hemisphere. Have a great week—PlainEnglish.com/600 is where you’ll find all the resources for this lesson, and we’ll be back on Thursday. Our topic will be: Which English-speaking country has the best flag? I told you they would be easy! See you then.