Go about your business
Today’s expression is to “go about your business.” This is an easy one to understand; the hard part is knowing when to use it. To go about your business is to do what you normally do—that’s it. Just do what you normally do in a normal day.
Have you ever seen the show “Cops”? If you have…then, I’m sorry. It’s not a great show. But the idea is this. You, as a viewer, get to ride along with the police as they go about their business, as they have a normal night patrolling the streets of Memphis or Albuquerque or wherever. It’s a lower-budget, lower-quality form of true crime .
Watching “Cops” requires you to pretend that you’re watching a normal night. The situations are real, but an hourlong show packs a lot of drama and makes it seem like every night is as dramatic as a single episode. It doesn’t really show what a real, normal night is like on the police force. You don’t see the tedious driving around all night, the report writing, the sitting around, putting gas in their cars, whatever. The producers might spend a week following the cops around everywhere and produce like thirty minutes of content out of dozens or hundreds of hours with the police.
But still, the situations are real and they invite you to believe you’re just riding there with the cops as they go about their business, and that every hour on the beat is as dramatic as it is in the show.
I remember the summer of 2021, when the weather started to get nice in Chicago. What was really nice about it was…people were out, going about their business. From the beginning of COVID through about the middle of 2021, so about a year, the streets were quiet, restaurants were empty, people seemed to be rushing to one place and then home again. People were not doing their normal things, the way they normally did them.
But then when more people got vaccinated, the case counts went down, a pill came out, the big danger had passed—what did people do? They started going about their business. They started having a normal day, doing what they would typically do on an average day. And it felt great, at least after so much social distancing.
You can also use “go about your business” as an imperative. When you do this, you’re telling someone to carry on as if nothing were different. I’ll give you an example. I like to be a pretty low-maintenance house guest. So if I visit someone, and my host says, “I can make some breakfast, how do you like your coffee? Do you need me to set up a place for you to work? Are you too hot? Are you too cold?” I’ll just say stop—go about your business. Have a normal day. I can figure out the coffeemaker. If I’m cold, I’ll put on a sweatshirt. Go about your business—pretend like I’m not here. That’s the kind of houseguest I am.
Twitter—I can’t even. Elon Musk fired half the company. And the rest of the company is supposed to just go about their business? The rest of the employees are supposed to carry on like it’s a normal workday? I don’t see how that’s possible. Pretend you’re an employee of Twitter. It’s not the biggest or best social network, but it is nonetheless, a big business with hundreds of millions of users and billions of dollars of annual revenue. Then a new boss comes along, fires all the top executives, lays off half the company, changes policies erratically, and scares away advertisers.
What are you supposed to do if you’re one of the employees still working there? How can you go about your business with all this chaos going on? It must be impossible; how can you not think about this drama all day, instead of thinking about your job? By the way, we might be watching one of the most dramatic corporate implosions ever—it’s too soon to say. But this could be a historic failure that they write about in business textbooks for decades. Or it could be one of the most successful turnarounds in history. We’ll have to wait and see.
Quote of the Week
Today’s quote is by the author Kazuo Ishiguro. He was born in Japan but went to live in England when he was a child. And he was talking about that experience, being Japanese by family and ethnicity but growing up in England. He said it felt like he had left a place suddenly without saying goodbye. And so here’s today’s quote. He said: “There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”
I’ve never thought or felt that way. It’s weird to think that someone might feel he’s on one track in life, and that there was an alternate life that might have been possible that he’s not having. This is the kind of feeling you might have if big and sudden changes are imposed on you. Here’s the quote from Kazuo Ishiguro, a Nobel-prize winning writer: “There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”
See you next time!
That’s all for today’s Plain English. By the way, the next true crime series I’ll be watching is called “The Watcher.” It’s creepy—based on a true story, and yes, I already did some research about what’s true and what’s false. “The Watcher” is on Netflix.
And speaking of what we’re watching…the final season of “Better Call Saul” is coming out. We talked about that one in Lesson 277 . At the time, there were five seasons; the sixth and final one is coming out now. It’s almost impossible to stream in the United States, but season six is on Netflix outside the U.S. So if you liked that show—the last season is becoming available. I think they’re releasing them one episode a week—I’m not sure. To prepare myself, I’m going back and watching all of seasons one through five so I can go in with maximum preparation for season six!
That’s all for today’s lesson; we’ll be back on Thursday to talk about a new scam called “pig butchering.” And yes, it is as bad as it sounds. See you then.
Use realistic expressions like a native speaker
