Pass up

Pass up

Today I’m going to show you how to use the phrasal verb, “pass up.”

To pass something up is to purposely not take an opportunity. We often use it with the word “opportunity” or with the word “chance.” There are two ways to use it. We can say, “pass up the chance to” or “pass up the opportunity to” and then a verb, or we can simply say, “pass up the chance” or “pass up an opportunity.”

The road to being an elite athlete is long and difficult. At an early age, kids have to decide how much time they will dedicate to practicing their sports. To train to be an athlete at the highest level, you have to pass up other opportunities in life. That means, you must choose not to do other things so that you can focus on your sport. You might have to pass up the opportunity to do other activities, such as play a musical instrument.

But it works the other way around, too. Other kids will make different choices. Maybe they’re good athletes, but they pass up the opportunity to pursue their dreams in athletics so they can focus on their studies or just have a normal childhood.

I mentioned that I watched the series “Emily in Paris.” In that series, an experienced manager of a company in Chicago passed up the chance to live in Paris, and she sent Emily instead. Why did that manager pass up the opportunity to move to Paris? She was pregnant and she didn’t want to have her baby—and then take her parental leave—in another country. So she passed up the opportunity to go to Paris, and she gave that opportunity to the character Emily.

It’s very common to use “pass up” when talking about an opportunity that’s so good that you can’t possibly refuse it. For Emily, the opportunity to go to Paris for a year was too good to pass up. That means, the chance was too good, there’s no way she could say “no.” It’s just too good to pass up.

I had an opportunity like that at work back in 2012. I had never had much interest in traveling to India; it just never caught my attention. But my company, at the time, needed someone to go to India for a month to teach employees there about how we do our work. And I thought that was too good to pass up. I mean, when else, realistically, would I have an opportunity not just to travel to India but to work there in that culture? So I went and had an amazing time and made great friends there. It was too good to pass up. The opportunity was too good; I couldn’t say no.

And that is how I used it in today’s lesson. Phil Mickelson and other pro golfers decided to take a mountain of cash from the government of Saudi Arabia . In exchange, they agreed to participate in the new LIV Golf series. The players obviously knew the general character and nature of this government—human rights abuses and all that. But they said, this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

The opportunity was too good; they couldn’t say “no.” The players may tell you that this is a good opportunity to introduce some competition into golf, so that other tours and tournaments can work better and differently than the PGA Tour. However, their explanations are not exactly convincing. This was about the money. The money was too good to pass up. For them—and it was their choice—they decided they couldn’t say “no” because of how much money was involved.

Quote of the Week

Here’s a quote today from Bill Gates, one of the co-founders of Microsoft. He said, “It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” To “heed the lessons of failure” is to pay attention to, and to learn from, the times that you don’t succeed.

Once more, here it is: “It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure,” according to Bill Gates.

See you next time!

Speaking of Microsoft … did you see that Internet Explorer is finally retired? You can’t get it anymore. It was the most popular web browser for ten years, before being overtaken by Chrome a few years back. Now Microsoft has another browser, Edge, and they’ve stopped supporting or updating good old IE.

I saw a Korean web developer bought a gravestone, put the Internet Explorer logo on it, and marked the dates of IE’s life: 1995 to 2022. And you know how on gravestones, there’s sometimes a line or two describing the person who’s buried below? Like, “Loving father” or whatever? This one said, beneath the name Internet Explorer, “He was a good tool to download other browsers.”

All right, that’s all for us here at Plain English for today, July 4, 2022. Happy Independence Day for those of you in the United States, enjoy your day off, be safe with the fireworks tonight. And we’ll see you back here on Thursday for a new lesson.