To spare

To spare

Today I’m going to show you how to use the verb “to spare.” If you “have something to spare,” you have more of it than you need.

Spare is a word that means “extra,” more than what is needed. There is a cruel rhyme in English. Monarchies wanted to produce two sons—an heir and a spare. That means, one son to take over the throne, and then one extra son just in case something happens to the first one. And that is why Prince Harry’s book is called “Spare.” He was the second son in a monarchy.

Anyway, when we use the term “to have (something) to spare,” it means you have more of it than you need. Today we were talking about obesity. Several lifestyle and societal factors have combined to make obesity more prevalent . Not as many people work physically demanding jobs. Plus, a lot of food is processed—and is less healthy.

To ward off obesity, then, requires time and money. You need the time to shop for and prepare healthier food. And if you work a desk job, you need to find time outside of working hours to get your exercise in.

But a lot of people do not have time and money to spare. They do not have extra time and extra money left over after they have met all their other obligations.

Here’s something you might hear in an office environment. “Do you have a minute to spare?” means, do you have an extra minute—just one minute—that you don’t need to meet your other obligations. You might say that if you need help for a small task.

Now those of us who have worked in offices, we know that “do you have a minute to spare?” doesn’t really mean one minute! So if you don’t want to help, you can say: “I honestly don’t have a minute to spare.” That’s something you might say if you’re in a major hurry or if you’re super busy.

In school, I used to hate timed tests. In a timed test, you had to take a test and finish it in a certain amount of time. I always felt pressured. And the pressure would mount because some students in the class would finish with time to spare. Some students would finish like 15 minutes before the end of the allotted time: they had more time than they needed! They finished with time to spare.

And what would happen is, I’d see someone stand up, smugly pack up her—it was always a girl, sorry—pack up her things and deliver the test to the teacher in the front of the room with a look of self-satisfaction on her face. She finished with 15 minutes to spare. And the rest of us were like, “What are we doing wrong if she’s already done?”

Have you ever had to cook—or just order food—for a large number of people? It’s impossible to know how much people will eat. And it’s better to have more than to have less. So when there are large gatherings of people, there’s usually some food to spare.

I used to work in a pretty big office in Chicago, and there would always be meetings. And some of those meetings had lunch. And very often, they had lunches to spare after the meetings—they’d just put them in the kitchen for anyone to take.

So for us, as employees, even if we weren’t part of a lunch meeting, we could still sometimes snag a free meal if one of the other meetings had food to spare—if the other meetings had more food than they needed.

Quote of the Week

A “critic” is a person who writes about art and literature and theater and things like that. Think about the whole profession of people who write about architecture or music—they evaluate it, they analyze it, they say what’s good and what’s not good. But they’re not the people producing the product.

So here’s a quote about that profession: “A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.” And that is a quote by a theater critic, Kenneth Tynan. “A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.”

See you next time!

There’s a funny scene in an old TV show, “Seinfeld.” Two women are in the bathroom, one in each stall. One realizes she’s out of toilet paper and asks the woman in the other stall if she has any to spare. The other woman says, “I don’t have any to spare. I can’t spare a square.” That means she can’t give up even one square to help another person in need.

That is all for today’s Plain English, for March 20, 2023. This was lesson number 556, so you can find the full lesson—including the transcripts—at PlainEnglish.com/556.