English Phrasal Verbs - Blow Up
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This Mother's Day, be the dad who went to Jared. Hey everybody, welcome to another phrasal verb episode. I hope that you're doing great. I hope your English learning is going well. I hope that these phrasal verb episodes have really helped you with phrasal verbs in English.

I like this method of learning phrasal verbs just through listening, listening to someone speaking naturally while using these phrasal verbs in different sentences. I hope you're enjoying these episodes. And in today's phrasal verb episode, we're going to look at just one phrasal verb because there are many meanings there.

that this phrasal verb can have, and that is blow up, the phrasal verb blow up. So we're going to look at three meanings. However, there are more. We're just going to focus on three of those meanings in this episode.

The first meaning is to explode. So literally, when something blows up, that means it physically explodes. For example, the building blew up, right? Maybe there was a bomb inside the building and the bomb went off and the building blew up, right?

The second meaning of blow up is to lose your temper or become really angry. For example, he blew up when he heard the bad news.

You can use blow up at someone if you want to talk about the fact that someone gets really angry and starts yelling and screaming at a person in particular. You can say he blew up at his assistant, for example.

And one other meaning of blow up is to suddenly become very popular, prevalent, or successful. And careful, because this one is slang. This is a slang usage of blow up. So for example, we could say, his latest video blew up overnight, meaning it became really popular overnight.

maybe in just one day. So he woke up the next day and it had tons of views, right? It blew up overnight.

Alright, now I'm going to talk about three different things so that I can use this phrasal verb with its different meanings. First, let me talk about Hollywood movies. I went to film school, for those of you who don't know, but I only went for six months, but I actually...

made some short films while I was in that film program. And I spent my days in Hollywood shooting these short movies. So talking about Hollywood movies, one of the most popular movie genres is action, action movies. And when people think of action movies, they

One of the first things that might come to mind is explosions. In action movies, things tend to blow up. Obviously not in every action movie, but this is a common characteristic that you might see throughout this genre. In fact, people who...

who maybe don't appreciate action movies that much because they don't find them smart or intelligent enough, might make fun of people who go to watch these movies just to see things blow up and to see special effects and huge explosions and things like that.

And the fact is, many people like watching things blow up. In action movies, it's always exciting when a car blows up. It just explodes. Or a building blows up. Or a bridge blows up. It adds to the drama, the excitement, the

It just makes things more interesting for many people. And we can't really deny that fact that explosions are interesting. And before writing my notes for this episode, I went and watched a video

of people blowing things up just to kind of get in the mood. And these people were shooting these different things with guns to blow them up. So they shot at paint cans to blow them up. They blew up

a car, I think, if I remember correctly. And they blew up a turkey, not a live turkey, a turkey that you would eat, like prepared to eat. And I'll be honest, it was pretty satisfying to watch them blow these things up. So I think there's just something in our nature that likes watching explosions. When things blow up,

It's exciting. It can be satisfying. And that's why many action movies include explosions because audiences like watching things blow up. So that was the first thing I wanted to talk about. Now let me talk about my basketball days and specifically about a certain coach that I had. This is a real story.

We had one coach who coached us for only several months. I think it was less than half a year. It was probably less than six months. But

He was honestly the best coach that we had. He made us perform at the highest level we had ever performed at. However, one thing to know about this coach was that he would get mad.

He had very high expectations for us. And when we did not meet those expectations, he would sometimes blow up at us and yell and scream and make us do things as punishment. So coaches can be like this sometimes. Honestly, some of the best coaches are

are the coaches that are hard on their players. And so I'm not here complaining about this coach blowing up at us and yelling at us because we played better under him than under any other coach. It wasn't even close. And so I'm not saying that it's good to blow up at people, but sometimes the best coaches are

at their players and that kind of stuff. For example, when he felt like we weren't really hustling, meaning we weren't running hard and putting in money

our best effort to do something, then he would sometimes blow up and stop what was going on during that practice and, and,

punish us like make us run or something or for example if we weren't following the plan if we looked like we were ignoring his instructions and not following the plan he would sometimes get mad or even blow up or for example sometimes we would be practicing and

We just couldn't finish the full exercise because we were really tired. So we didn't finish the way he wanted us to. Like maybe we were running a certain distance and at the end, some people were walking. Then he would sometimes blow up, get really mad, yell at us, make us do more things,

I didn't like those practices, to be honest. When I think back to my basketball practices, those were the hardest and the worst because I was always exhausted by the end. But I put in a lot of effort. I tried my best and I improved as a player from those practices and that

we could see that, the fruit of that when we played our games, meaning we saw the positive benefits of those hard practices and him pushing us during practice. So of course we didn't like when he blew up at us, but the practices themselves really helped us.

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And, uh, I remember one game, uh, we just were not playing well. Uh,

we were losing and I knew he was going to blow up at us during halftime and probably after the game. So I remember making sure to just try my best and run, hustle, do everything I could, even though we were losing and not playing well. And

because I knew that he was going to blow up and he did. And I remember that he specifically said that, uh, Connor is the only one that I saw trying his best out there. And I was happy about that because he recognized my effort, but I did that specifically because I knew how terrible, uh, we were that game. And I,

I wanted to kind of save myself from getting yelled at and lectured. So I tried my best and he blew up at everyone else, but he acknowledged that I was hustling. So I guess that was a good decision on my part. All right. One other topic I want to talk about is social media. So

Nowadays, social media trends, meaning things that are trending, they're popular, people are copying them and reproducing them, these patterns that you see on social media, these trends can blow up really quickly now. I think that many of you know what I'm talking about.

It doesn't take a long time for a trend to get really big and suddenly everyone is doing it. I'm not familiar with this, but I'm sure there are a lot of TikTok dance trends where people are doing some type of dance to some type of music and then that catches on, meaning other people start to do it and then

After a couple days, it has completely blown up, and now a bunch of people are doing this all around the world. That can happen really quickly. Now, this is something that's different with social media today compared to social media, I don't know, 10 years ago. That probably didn't happen 10 years ago. But nowadays, when something gets big,

it can blow up fast, right? Instagram reels, the trends that you see in these reels can get big overnight. They can blow up from one day to the next and suddenly everyone knows about that trend.

Oftentimes, I'm with my friends and they'll ask each other, oh, have you seen that reel, blah, blah, blah, and they describe it. And usually, the other people say, yeah, I've seen that because these reels or just the trends in the reels, they blow up really quickly, right? And certain videos can blow up.

like YouTube videos or just videos on social media, Instagram, TikTok. I've had this happen. I remember when I tried to post some stuff on TikTok. I think this was a year and a half ago, maybe. I remember that some of those videos...

Not many, I think three or four of them in total blew up and got big and had over a million views.

And that was in a short period of time. So I remember how quickly that happened sometimes. Like, whoa, this video blew up. I got a million views in a short period of time. And that can happen, especially with these short videos that people share and they can become popular really quickly. It's not easy to...

produce multiple videos that blow up overnight, but it can happen. And not only videos, but just other types of posts can blow up overnight. For example, a tweet on Twitter or X, as we call it now. I think that can blow up and get really big, especially if

It's something controversial and people are arguing about it. That can become really popular really quickly. Instagram posts can blow up.

When I posted on Instagram in the past, because I don't really do this nowadays, maybe I will in the future, but not currently. When I used to post on Instagram, I had that happen a couple times, but really it was two or three times maybe where I posted something and it got a lot of

views or whatever the metric was. But I've had a couple that have blown up

And I checked it two days later or something and it had tons of views or tons of likes. And so that happened on a couple of occasions, but it's not easy to create content on Instagram and have it blow up overnight and get a ton of exposure like that. It happens once in a while, but

It's not something you can reproduce every day, right? So those types of posts can blow up. Really, this is the goal for many people when they post on social media or maybe on YouTube. They want their video or their content to go viral. They want it to blow up and reach a huge audience. And let me tell you,

When this happens, it doesn't always have a huge effect for you or your business, if that's the goal. I've had viral videos before, and quite honestly, they've done nothing for my content, my business, so to say. I'm not saying that they can't help you. Sometimes they can really help you, for sure, but sometimes

Sometimes you think that it's going to help you more than it really does. So it's great when you're a business and you post some content and it blows up, but it's

Don't make that your whole business plan. Like I just need one post to go viral and then I'll be good. Then I'll get tons of clients or whatever. It doesn't always happen like that. So just something to note.

Alright, I hope that as I was speaking, you were able to hear this phrasal verb used many times, and hopefully you feel comfortable with these different usages of it, the different meanings, and I want to encourage you to use my advanced podcast episodes to practice with

real English spoken fast, not slow, clear English like in these episodes. So if you want that, you can go down below and click on the link to sign up. That's patreon.com slash listening time. And check out my U.S. Conversations podcast in which I talk to other native English speakers from around the U.S., from different states, different cities, and

You'll learn a lot about the geography here, the culture in the different parts of the country. It's really educational, really fun, and it's great practice for your listening. So go down and click on the link for that to check that out. That's patreon.com slash usconversations. All right. Thank you so much for listening to this phrasal verb episode, and I'll talk to you in the next one.

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