Spend time
This is an easy one today: you’ve probably heard it many, many times. It’s called “spend time.” Typically , we use the word “spend” with money. If you have $10 in your pocket and you spend $2 on a cup of coffee, you have $8 remaining. You spend money when you give it away in exchange for something else. You spend $2, you get a coffee.
It’s similar with time. We all have a budget of time. We have 24 hours in a day. We all have a limited number of days, although we don’t know the exact number. When we spend time on something, we make conscious choice to dedicate some of our limited time to that purpose.
Do you like to spend time with your family? That means, do you like to dedicate part of your limited time on this earth to this activity? A lot of people do, but certainly not everyone does. Some people prefer to spend time alone; they like to dedicate time to being alone. Other people hate spending time alone. That’s how we use “spend time.”
In today’s lesson, you heard that police forces around the U.S. are spending a lot of time investigating car thefts . Police forces have a limited number of man-hours and they increasingly spend those hours investigating car thefts. And it’s all because of online tutorials showing how to steal a Hyundai or a Kia with just a USB cable .
The police forces would much rather spend their time doing other things. They have other cases to solve, but they also want to spend time in the community, getting to know the residents, building trust, and preventing crime.
When you say “spend time,” you’re speaking in general. But you can also say “spend” plus a specific amount of time. For example, I spend about two hours writing each lesson. That’s how much time I dedicate, two hours to writing the content that you hear in just 20 minutes (12 or 13 minutes if you listen to the fast version!).
That’s not to mention the time I spend preparing the content for the web site, social media, video lessons, and the like. All in all, I think I spend about six to eight hours per lesson if you include recording and all that stuff. And there are two a week, so I spend about twelve to sixteen hours per week creating the content for all of you.
Have you ever lost your work because you forgot to save it? That doesn’t happen as much anymore since a lot of documents are auto-saved or backed up to the cloud. But it used to be that you needed to hit Control + S at regular intervals, because if your computer froze, you’d lose a lot of work. This has happened to me—I can’t tell you how many times.
There’s one time I remember. I was in Cincinnati working at my company’s office there. I was working for a client based in the city. And I was working at the office on something for the next day or the next week. And my computer crashed and I lost the whole PowerPoint presentation I had been working on. I had spent probably three or four hours on it. And for whatever reason, I forgot to save it. And the computer crashed—just a full, blue screen of death crash. And the file was lost.
So I had to spend another three or four hours re-creating the slides late at night. I was the only one on that floor working late at night, and I was cursing myself for losing all that work.
If you travel to a place, you use “spend time” that way, too. In April, I spent two weeks in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. I was in Tulum and Cancun and I did a day trip to a city called Valladolid. Mexico City, where I live, is not a hot place. It’s not cold, but it’s not hot either. So it was nice to spend some time in a warmer climate.
When I was in my previous job, I traveled a lot, at least before the pandemic. I would spend three or four days a week on the road—in another city, like Cincinnati, Atlanta, New York, Toronto, wherever.
You can even use this for a place you’ve lived. I spent fifteen years in Chicago. That means, I lived there for fifteen years. Out of all the years I’m going to have in my life, who knows how many they will be, I dedicated fifteen of them to living in Chicago. Obviously, I wasn’t there 24/7 for all fifteen years. But you can say, “I spent three years in New York” if, like me, you lived for three years in New York.
JR’s song of the week
We mentioned Tina Turner on Monday, and in honor of her passing, JR has selected a Tina Turner song for today. It’s “The Best.” The famous lines go like this: “You’re simply the best, better than all the rest, better than anyone, anyone I ever met.”
For the last thirty years, about, Tina Turner lived in the Swiss town of Küsnacht, on Lake Zurich. She became a Swiss citizen in 2013. I had no idea. Küsnacht, from the pictures, looks absolutely stunning.
See you next time!
That’s all for today’s Plain English. Remember, the full lesson, including transcripts, are available online at PlainEnglish.com/581. We’ll be back on Monday with a new topic. See you then.
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