Thin out
The English expression we’ll talk about today is “thin out.” This is a phrasal verb. And this is hard to explain. I’m going to try my best, so here we go.
You know the word “thin,” right, it’s the opposite of “thick.” There’s thick and there’s thin. Sometimes you take something that’s thick and you want to make it thin. And when you do that, you thin it out.
But wait: you can’t just use this for making anything thin. For example, if you lose weight, if you lose body fat, you don’t say thin out. You just say, “get thinner.”
So when do you use thin out? You use “thin out” when you remove the component parts, so that there are fewer parts covering the same area, fewer parts covering the same area.
The easiest way to think about this is in forestry. Imagine you have a dense forest. There are lots and lots of trees and it’s very thick. But a dense forest doesn’t allow all trees to grow in the healthiest way. In forestry, it’s sometimes necessary to thin out the forest.
To thin out the forest means: you go into the forest and you cut down some trees evenly so that the forest covers the same area, but it’s not as dense. There are not as many trees, but the forest covers the same area.
Now notice: this is not the same thing as cutting down all trees in one part of the forest. This is about cutting down some trees over the whole area, so the forest covers the same area, but there are fewer trees in it. That’s “thin out.”
At my barbershop, the barber cuts my hair. And then, he takes a special kind of scissors to thin out my hair. I like this in the summertime. My barber uses this scissor on my whole head, but it only cuts a little of the hair that it touches. So my head is still covered in hair, but there’s less of it. It’s less dense, less thick because these scissors thin it out.
Some people’s hair might thin out…involuntarily. Some people lose all the hair in one region, that’s called a bald spot. Other people, they might lose hair starting on the forehead and working backward. That’s called a receding hairline. But other people keep their hair on their whole head, but it just gets thinner and thinner over the years. For them, their hair is thinning out. There’s less volume, less material. But it covers the same area.
Did I manage to offend anyone? I hope not.
Now to the ozone layer . When I was a kid, they kept talking about “the hole in the ozone layer.” And it made you think there was a hole, like a big area where there was no ozone. That wasn’t exactly right. There were areas where the ozone was much thinner. The whole globe was covered in ozone; there was no hole.
But the ozone was thinning out over the poles. So ozone still covered Antarctica; it still covered the Arctic Circle. But the ozone layer there was thinner. It became less dense. Think back to the dense forest, where they cut down trees in the interior to make it less dense. Instead of trees, these were O-3 molecules that were being dismantled when they reacted with the chlorine in CFCs. The ozone layer was thinning out over the poles.
Here’s another way to use it: the crowd is starting to thin out. If you go to a crowded concert or a crowded bar, there are a lot of people packed into the whole space. The whole space is full, and people are pushing up next to each other, you can barely move.
But then as the night goes on, some people start to leave. And what happens? The whole space is still full of people, but now everyone has a little more breathing room. There’s a little more space in between every person. The crowd is starting to thin out.
Quote of the Week
Here’s a quote from Mark Twain, a writer. He said, “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”
I saw that written on the wall of the metro here in Mexico City and I stopped and took a picture of it because I knew I wanted to use it as the Quote of the Week. “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody,” said Mark Twain.
See you next time!
And that is all for today’s Plain English. Congratulations on making it to the end. And congratulations on all the great progress you’re making in English.
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Coming on Thursday, we’ll revisit some recent lesson topics that have been in the news lately. See you then!
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