Guard against
It’s a phrasal verb today. The expression I have chosen is to “guard against.” When you guard against something, you try to prevent something bad from happening. When you guard against something, you are taking preventative measures: you are trying to do things in advance that make it less likely that something bad happens.
There are two ways to use this. Right after the word “against” you can either put a noun—something bad—or you can put an “-ing” verb.
Let’s take an example of the flu, the influenza virus. You have heard of the flu shot, which you can get voluntarily before “flu season” starts. From the perspective of a public health official, the flu shot guards against the spread of influenza. In this case, what’s our “bad thing”? It’s “the spread of influenza.” The flu shot guards against the spread of influenza.
To an individual, the bad thing isn’t so much the spread of the virus, the bad thing would be getting the virus yourself. So an individual person might say he has gotten the flu vaccine to guard against getting influenza.
So you can see the two ways of using “guard against” here. You can guard against the spread of influenza. And you can guard against getting influenza. Either “the spread”, a noun, or “getting”, an -ing verb, can come after the word against.
If you’re an investor, you might have invested in stocks, bonds, real estate, private companies, whatever. But you might guard against heavy losses by holding some of your money in cash—in a safe bank account, in other words. So if the economy takes a turn for the worse, your stocks will be worth a lot less, your real estate might decline in value, but your cash won’t change in value. You can guard against losses, or guard against losing a lot of money, by holding some cash in your portfolio.
If you live in a country with a volatile currency, you might guard against inflation by either keeping some money in euros or US dollars, or by holding hard assets like real estate that have intrinsic value. Those are two ways to guard against inflation if you live in a country with an unstable currency.
Many international travelers are trying to guard against getting the coronavirus by wearing paper masks. This may not be a very effective way to guard against getting the virus. However, it might be a good way to guard against spreading the virus to others.
Big companies invest a lot of money to guard against data breaches. A data breach is when private data is leaked or stolen by hackers. If you hold consumer data, you need to guard against data breaches, guard against hackers. This risk is present for anyone who serves consumers, including me, with Plain English Plus+. I guard against these risks by using services that hold the credit card data for me—I don’t want to hold that data, so I have a super-secure, well-established payment provider do it for me. That would be either Stripe or PayPal, in my case. I’m guarding against a data breach by not holding sensitive data to begin with.
Retail shops have to guard against theft. They may do that by putting up signs, having a security guard, using electronic tags, security cameras, and training for staff members. Those are all good ways to guard against theft, to guard against losses.
Quote of the week
This is a funny quote for you this week. I’m reading a book about the history of business in America and came across a good quote from a professor of marketing and advertising. His name is Steuart Henderson Britt, and here’s the quote: “Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.” I just love these quotes that take a business topic and make it visual, and funny. It means you have to get the word out about your business. It’s not enough to just do something good: you have to proactively get out there and do some marketing, some advertising. So here it is once more. “Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.”
That’s all for today, thanks again for joining us for episode 234. Coming up next time, the internet on an entire continent slowed down because two undersea cables broke. We’ll tell you all about that on Monday’s episode.
If you enjoyed today’s episode, then you’ll love Plain English Plus+, our new membership. One of the best parts about it is the video lessons, which help you express more complicated ideas. Often when we learn, we learn to speak in simple, direct sentences. But then we all get to a point where we want to start making connections between ideas and expressing ourselves in a more complicated way. And that’s exactly what the video lessons are all about. We have one new one for each episode. So if you think that would be helpful, come join us at PlainEnglish.com/plus.
Use realistic expressions like a native speaker
