Sigh of relief
The expression I’ve chosen to review this week is “sigh of relief.” A sigh of relief—let’s see if I can do one for you here. When you are relieved, when you were expecting the worst, but the worst didn’t happen, you breathe a sigh of relief. Chile thought it might be forced to negotiate with Bolivia over territorial access to the Pacific, but when the court ruled in its favor—they breathed a sigh of relief. Whew! Good thing we didn’t lose that case. That’s a sigh of relief.
A sigh is like a really heavy breath. There are two kinds of sighs. A normal sigh is like, you’re complaining about something with your breath. What? Work late again? Ugh…okay. I guess I will. Or, I’m running late, I have to be somewhere, and I get on the highway and there’s bumper-to-bumper traffic. Ugh. All right, I guess I’ll be late to wherever I am going. If you watch TV shows or movies with English subtitles, sometimes the subtitles say the word in brackets to show you what the character is doing.
But a sigh of relief is more like, something was a close call. You were expecting it to be bad, but it wasn’t. Guess who’s breathing a sigh of relief right now? I think they are in Canada, right? For a while it looked like Mexico and the United States were going to sign a new trade agreement in place of NAFTA, and leave Canada out of the mix. But at the last minute, Canada joined the agreement and even won some key victories. I bet they’re breathing a sigh of relief in Canada. It wasn’t the agreement they were hoping for, but it could have been a lot worse. Disaster averted, right?
Have you ever been going maybe a little too fast on the highway and then passed a police car? That’s happened to me—let’s just say more than once. And then you look in your mirror and the police car isn’t coming after you. That’s when you breathe a sigh of relief (and hopefully slow down a little bit). It could have been worse.
That’s all for today. If you can’t get enough Plain English, then be sure to sign up for the episode emails at PlainEnglish.com/mail. You get two extra goodies by being on the list. First, you’ll get one additional word or phrase per episode, and you’ll get links to the English articles I use to prepare the show. So if a particular episode catches your interest, you can read more in English about that topic. PlainEnglish.com/mail and enter your details.
JR and I will be back on Thursday with episode number 95. See you then!
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