Get rid of

Get rid of

“Get rid of.”

This means to take something and remove it, eliminate it, get it out of your space, get it out of your possession.

This is informal, but very common. If you move to a new house or apartment, you have some choices to make. You probably have hundreds of choices to make. As you pack, getting ready for the move, you inevitably have to ask yourself: keep it or get rid of it?

I’m talking about household possessions. When you move, you have to pack everything. It takes time and money to pack and move your possessions. So this is a natural time to ask if you still want something in your life.

This could be a piece of clothing. It could be a piece of furniture. Souvenirs from old trips, household supplies, books, knickknacks, electronic devices you don’t use anymore, chargers for electronic devices you don’t use anymore. Keep it or get rid of it? You have to ask that question about everything you pack.

“Get rid of it” doesn’t necessarily mean put it in the trash, although it can mean that. It just means to eliminate from your possession. You can sell something. You can donate something. You can put it in the trash. You can recycle it. All these are ways to get rid of something. But the important thing is, after you get rid of it, it’s not in your life anymore.

Often, we use “get rid of” with something that’s not desirable, something we don’t want, but which we have anyway. “I can’t wait to get rid of that ugly chair,” you might say. That means, you are going to either sell or donate that chair, or maybe give it away. It’s ugly to you, but someone else might want it. Get it out of your life! Get rid of it.

Or in your garage, you might have stuff that’s broken, stuff you don’t use anymore. Maybe you replaced your computer and the old computer is still in a drawer. It’s time to get rid of it. Take it to a recycling center, sell it, whatever, but get it out of your life.

How do big city residents get rid of their trash? It’s different in different places. In Amsterdam, they have a series of underground tunnels and boats that take the trash away. In Singapore, many buildings have a pneumatic system that sucks trash bags into a central container. Paris, Chicago, Barcelona, and many other cities use trash bins. New York, at least for now, just leaves it on the street for sanitation workers to collect.

That’s how people get rid of their trash: that’s how the trash leaves their possession and goes to—wherever, a landfill, a sorting facility maybe.

JR and I both watched the TV series “You” on Netflix. The characters were always struggling to get rid of a body. No spoilers, but the main characters killed people in that show. And they had to get rid of the evidence, get rid of the weapons they used, get rid of clothes with blood stains on them, and get rid of the body. Dispose of all these things—get them out of their possession so they’re no longer in the house, the car, nowhere in their lives. They tried to get rid of those things.

Here are a few more quick examples. You might get rid of old magazines that you’ll never read again. If you have a yard, you might want to get rid of the weeds. If your medicine cabinet is full of old prescription bottles with a few pills left in each of them, you probably want to get rid of those bottles of expired medication.

See you next time!

And that is all for us here at Plain English. Now you may have noticed we have retired the quote of the week and the song of the week. I want to personally thank JR for picking many hundreds of songs for us to listen to together. But everything has its time, and I want to make these episodes a little shorter, a little more focused.

We have a lot of great improvements coming in Plain English this year, so we just wanted to make room for some new features. We might bring the song of the week back in some form, but for now we’re putting our energies into new projects.

This was lesson 638, so remember the lesson home page can be found at PlainEnglish.com/638. So check that out for the full transcripts and the rest of the lesson resources, PlainEnglish.com/638. We’ll be back here on Thursday with a new episode. See you then.