Slim down

Slim down

Today’s expression is “slim down.” There are two ways to use “slim down.” I will tell you both of those ways today. The first way to use it is with a person; the second way to use it is with a thing. Let’s start with a person.

If a person wants to lose weight, lose fat, then you would say that person wants to slim down. You might say that you want to slim down before your wedding. Just lose a little weight before getting into that tux or wedding dress.

We were talking about movies today. Actors change their bodies all the time. An actor who has a lot of muscle might need to slim down to play the role of a character that’s in average shape.

Winnie-the-Pooh may not be a person, but he is an anthropomorphic character. That means he’s a non-person made to act and look like a person. We’re meant to think of Winnie as kind of like a person, even though he’s a bear.

Well one day he squeezes into Rabbit’s home and eats a huge feast . Then, he gets stuck in the door on his way out. He ate too much, and now he can’t fit out the door. He needs to slim down before he can get out the door. And his friend Christopher helps him slim down over the next week.

So slim down with a person means, to lose a little weight. To get a little slimmer.

You can use “slim down” with a thing, also, if that thing is thick or—well, fat. So let’s say you’re an author and you’re not (yet!) as famous as Stephen King. Stephen King has written some fat books. I think “It” was over 1,000 pages. Most authors can’t get away with that. So if your manuscript is 800 pages, you might want to slim it down a little bit. You might want to make your manuscript thinner. So we say, you might want to slim it down, you might want to make it a little thinner.

Amazon announced it would slim down its workforce. The tech giant announced it would eliminate 18,000 jobs in one of the largest rounds of layoffs in this cycle. The workforce—the number of employees—grew and grew during the pandemic. And now they have more workers than their sales and business can justify, in the opinion of the CEO, Andy Jassy. And so they are going to slim down their workforce. They’ll take their large workforce and make it smaller.

A company can slim down if it’s too big. For example, I just read an extremely long book about the company GE—”General Electric,” as it was once known. The company is over 125 years old and it was one of the biggest and most successful conglomerates in history. But as you learned in Lesson 420, conglomerates are falling out of fashion . So GE has decided to slim down. They are getting less big! They sold a lot of businesses, a lot of parts of their company. Soon, the only thing left of big GE will be the jet-airplane division. GE is slimming down.

JR’s song of the week

It’s Thursday, so JR has selected a song of the week. Today it’s “Cure For Me” by the artist Aurora. She’s a Norwegian singer-songwriter. The song came out in 2021. At the time, Aurora said the song was about this question: “Why is it so difficult to let others be themselves?”

This is a good song; if you like it, too, and if you want to make your own song based on “Cure For Me” by Aurora, then you will be free to do so in the year 2116.

See you next time!

And that brings us to the end of today’s Plain English. I hope you learned a lot. I don’t know about this new Winnie-the-Pooh movie. It’s coming out next month in most markets. I don’t think I will be seeing it or the Peter Pan version next year. But that’s just me.

Well the audio portion of the lesson is over, but the fun continues at PlainEnglish.com/541. You’ll find a free transcript and links to some English articles about today’s topic. If you’re a Plus+ member, there’s a step-by-step video lesson, all the exercises, the chance practice what you’ve learned, and much more. All for you at PlainEnglish.com/541.

We’ll be back on Monday with a new lesson. See you then!