Nook and cranny
This is a quirky little expression, but it’s a good one to know. Nook and cranny. Don’t ask me to explain what a cranny is: it only exists in the context of this expression. When we use this expression, we are talking about all the tiny little spaces that are part of a bigger thing.
Today we were talking about cars. There are a lot of nooks and crannies in cars. There’s the storage inside the driver’s and passenger-side doors. There’s the storage in the center console. There’s the area on top of the back seat. There’s the glove compartment. The place where you charge your phone. The place where you store your sunglasses. In the back, there might be cupholders. An armrest might come down in the back seat. All these are little details, little spaces. In traditional photos, it can be hard to see all the nooks and crannies of a car’s interior. But with Cazoo’s online photography, you can swivel and zoom and see every little detail of the inside of the car. It’s pretty cool: it can let you see all the nooks and crannies of a car’s interior.
What else has a lot of nooks and crannies? An old house, right? An old house is full of nooks and crannies, especially if that house has had additions over the years. You have lot of cabinets, areas under staircases, closets with shelves high above your head, secret doors to the attic, lots of small little areas. Kids love exploring the nooks and crannies of old houses.
A few weeks ago, we talked about the power of ultraviolet light to disinfect surfaces. This is especially important in hospitals, where there are a lot of surfaces that might help spread the virus. Hospitals are careful to follow sanitizing protocols, where people—in a labor-intensive process—have to clean all the nooks and crannies of exam rooms, especially after sick patients have been inside. But what if you could find a much easier way to do that? A blast of ultraviolet light could get all the nooks and crannies with much less effort than a traditional cleaning job.
Years ago, I lived in an apartment that was 400 square feet: that’s just 40 square meters. That’s small and I lived there for seven years. When you live in an apartment that small, you need to use every nook and cranny of storage space. You can’t let any potential storage space go to waste. You use the full height of the closet. You use the space under your bed. You put shelves everywhere they’ll fit. You really need to take advantage of all your space; you need to use every nook and cranny, since you don’t have any space to waste.
We sometimes use “nook and cranny” when we want to emphasize that we’ve looked in every small possible spot for something that’s missing. If you lose your keys, you might say that you looked in every nook and cranny in your house and you still haven’t found them.
JR’s song of the week
Today’s song of the week is “Don’t Speak” by the band No Doubt. JR picked this song out of a sense of personal nostalgia because this is one song they always used in his English classes in Mexico. I watched the video and agree it’s probably a good song for beginners. The words make sense, for the most part, and you can understand them. So in a nod to all the English classrooms out there, JR picks “Don’t Speak” by No Doubt.
See you next time!
And that is all for today. Remember to join our free Facebook group at PlainEnglish.com/Facebook and share your stories about used-car buying. I’d love to hear your experiences—good or bad—in buying secondhand cars.
Coming up on Monday: Joe Biden’s road to the White House. We’ll talk about what he campaigned on and how the last few months of the campaign played out. The Monday after, November 30, we’ll do a post-mortem on the Trump presidency. So two more on the American elections coming up next Monday and the following Monday. See you then!
Use realistic expressions like a native speaker
