Run out

Run out

You guys are lucky today, I picked an easy one. The phrasal verb I picked is “run out.” This is one of the most common phrasal verbs in all of English, and you absolutely must know how to use it.

We use “run out” when we have an amount, or a quantity, of something, and that quantity is moving toward zero. We usually say this when the quantity is almost gone. Let’s start with two examples that are very common: time and money.

Here’s how you form it. “I am running out of time” means that I’m the one who has time, and the amount of time I have now is going toward zero.

Imagine you’re taking a test and the test is one hundred questions. You’ve finished 95 of them, and you have five questions left. The test was three hours, but now you’ve only got ten minutes until the end. Time is running out. You once had three hours. Now you have only ten minutes, oops—now, it’s only nine minutes. Time is running out, it’s moving toward zero, and we are close to the end.

I told you today that I spent an hour looking at a painting . At first, an hour seemed like more than enough time; almost too much time. But after 48 minutes, I got the sensation that my time was running out. I didn’t want my time to end. What seemed like a lot at the beginning now seemed like not very much, not when there was only 12 minutes left. I started to feel a little sad that my hour would run out.

Next, pretend you’re renovating your kitchen. You have a budget to do all the renovations. But things cost more than you expected. And you also want to expand the scope a little bit—you want to do things that you didn’t originally plan. That tends to happen with big renovation projects, right? Soon, you realize you’re running out of money for this project. The money you set aside for this project is moving toward zero. You’re spending it all and you don’t have much left. You need to stop ordering new things and finish the renovation because you’re running out of money.

In both those examples, we say “I am running out” or “We are running out” to describe the sensation we get when what we have is moving toward zero. Just ten minutes left in the exam; just a few hundred dollars left in the budget. We’re running out; we’re getting close to zero.

We can also use this in the past tense. What happens if you have guests in your house and everyone takes a hot shower in the morning? The last person has to take a cold shower—or at least a room-temperature one. Why? Because you run out of hot water. I don’t know how it is where you live, but here most houses have a hot water tank. The tank starts full of hot water. Then, as all the house guests cycle through their showers, the hot water slowly moves toward zero. If the water runs out, then you have to wait for the tank to heat water again. If you’re the unlucky last person, you might have to say, “We ran out of hot water.”

JR knows what it’s like to run out of something in the morning. For some reason, this guy cannot monitor his supply of coffee beans. I don’t know what it is, but he frequently runs out of coffee beans, so he has to go out and buy some in the morning. And he tells me, “I ran out of coffee again this morning!”

Have you ever run out of gas? I have never run out of gas. I’ve come close. My car tells me approximately how many miles I can drive before I completely run out of gas. I think I was down to 7 miles recently. Here’s what I said to myself when I got to about 15 or 20 miles left. I said, “I’m running out of gas. I need to go fill up.” But I’ve never totally run out of gas. That would not be fun, especially since last weekend was like 100 degrees.

JR’s song of the week

Today’s song of the week is “Lost Without You” by Kygo, with Dean Lewis. I think JR was inspired by his visit to Lollapalooza music festival with this one. Kygo was here in Chicago and JR went to see him. This song is a collaboration with Dean Lewis. “I’m a little lost without you” is the chorus line on this one. “Lost Without You” by the Norwegian producer Kygo, with Dean Lewis.

See you next time!

This is funny. I once had a boss who told me, you can run out of anything, just don’t run out of business cards. That was back when people used business cards! He said, you can run out of time, you can run out of money, you can run out of patience, you can run out of energy, you can run out of gas, but you cannot run out of business cards. He told me that before my first business trip. Maybe that’s why I still have stacks of old business cards from old jobs lying around my apartment to this day.

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