AEE 2434: Vocabulary to Help With Your English Grind
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This is an All Ears English podcast, episode 2434, vocabulary to help with your English grind. Welcome to the All Ears English podcast downloaded more than 200 million times. Are you feeling stuck with your English? We'll show you how to become fearless and fluent by focusing on connection, not perfection. With your American hosts,

Michelle Kaplan, the New York radio girl, and Aubrey Carter, the IELTS whiz, coming to you from Arizona and New York City, USA. And to get your transcripts delivered by email every week, go to allearsenglish.com forward slash subscribe.

Today, we answer a listener question about the word grind. There are so many ways to use it, and the grammar depends on the context. Listen in to find out more.

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Hello, Michelle. How are you? Hello, Aubrey. I'm good. I'm excited to be recording with you today. Yes, so fun. Lindsay is out of town. She's on a very exciting trip in Europe, but she will be back next week. Yes, yes. And this is really fun. Michelle, do you make coffee with fresh grounds? Ooh.

I wish I could say I was that fancy, but I don't. Do you? No, but for me, it's more not wanting the mess. Like, oh, just the mess of wet coffee grounds. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. I get it. It is more delicious when I go to a place and I get coffee and they're using a French press and fresh grounds. It is much more tasty. Definitely. I do agree. You can tell the difference. So maybe one day I'll get more into it. So, all

Today we are going to be answering a really good listener question. And this is from a listener asked us this question on YouTube. So this is from Story Bits in Russian. You want me to read the question?

Sure. Let's do it. They said, thanks for the episode. I was just thinking about coffee and this episode came to mind again. It's probably the episode where you and Lindsay talked about connecting over how you take your coffee. Amazing. Then they said, it also got me thinking about the words grind, ground and grinded. These terms can be really tricky, especially since AI overviews say ground is the standard past tense, while grinded shows up more in informal American English.

I would love to hear your take on this and maybe see a few examples of grind in different contexts. Warm greetings from Spain. Thank you for this awesome question. Good question. Very good question. Yeah, Aubrey, this is a little bit tricky, but we're going to get down to it. So let's start with the first one we're going to get to today, which is grind and...

and ground. So tell us about this one, Aubrey. - Yeah, so it is tricky because there are a few meanings of the word grind. And I have heard this mistake, it's pretty generally accepted to hear grinded as the past tense in the States.

But what's tricky is it's used for some of the meanings, but not all of them. So this first one that we were talking about at the top of the episode, to grind something down, to reduce it to small particles or powder by crushing, this is what we do with coffee beans, right? We grind them. And so we might say, I'm going to grind up some coffee beans for fresh roasted coffee, or I'm going to grind up some fresh rosemary, maybe with a mortar and pestle. Do you ever grind up fresh herbs? Yeah.

No. I don't either. I know a lot of people do. Real chefs do. A lot of you listeners out there probably do. I'm sure it's more delicious fresh or recent.

I love how everything you ask me that would make me kind of this, you know, very classy, refined person. I'm like, nope, I don't do it. The episode where today I think I said, no, I don't go to a spa. I don't grab my coffee. I don't grab my rosemary. No grinding. No spa. No. So you're just so plain, Michelle. So plain. Guess what? I am too. I also don't grind fresh herbs.

But I have thought about it before. I know people who do. I'm like, maybe I should be, right? Maybe, maybe, maybe we will. For this meaning of grind, I have never heard anyone say grinded, right? You know, I grinded some herbs. I grinded the coffee grounds. No, no, this is not. So like sometimes for different meanings, yes, but not for this one, right? It's interesting how we Americans make some grammar mistakes with like one meaning of a verb, but not another. Tricky.

That is tricky. Yeah. So here, yeah, I would say you're more likely to say ground, right? In this kind of a situation. Yeah. Past tense is ground. And even Americans in general are more likely to say ground. I ground these herbs.

And then it's interesting for a verb like this, and we'll talk about this more in a minute, often, at least in the States, people sort of avoid using the simple past with the past tense verb. And instead they say, you know, I used to grind herbs, but now I don't. We'll find this workaround if we're not sure if it's ground or grinded.

That's interesting. That's true. So even native speakers, you know, we'll just be, we'll just kind of dance around it, try and find another way to say it if we're not sure. Definitely. I'm guilty of that. Right. Oh, I needed to grind some herbs. So I got out my portal of basil. Yeah.

That's really funny. There are more meanings of grinding, right? What is another definition for this? Another one is to rub together gratingly. So like if I'm, you know, putting my... Well, okay, let's think about teeth, right? If you grind your teeth, you're like squishing them together. And a lot of times people do that when they have anxiety in their sleep.

So that can be definitely a bad habit for your teeth. Yeah, I might say my son has a habit of grinding his teeth. And just like this means like putting them together and then rubbing them gratingly against each other. And so this is a meaning where we might hear that mistake in the States.

My son grinded his teeth when he was young, but not now. It is ungrammatical. It is a mistake. But this you might hear, like AI said for this listener, might say, oh, in America, Americans might use grinded as the past tense verb for this definition. Yeah. Or you could say, I could hear the gears grinding when the pool pump started.

So you might say something like that as well. And then you might hear in the past tense, the gears grinded when they started. Like this, I feel like I have heard this mistake in the past. So it's interesting how depending on the definition, you know, at least speakers in the States might use ground or grinded. Though ground is always the correct past tense verb.

Right. Exactly. Interesting. And another definition could be to do hard, dull work. So as a verb, right? He had to grind through hours of homework. Yeah. And this is really interesting. I thought about this for a couple of minutes. I'm like, would someone say I grinded through hours of homework?

Maybe. I certainly wouldn't hear, I ground through hours of homework, even though that's the correct past tense. Right. This meaning, I think, especially, we use this workaround and we'll say like, he had to grind through hours of homework. Or I just needed to grind away until I finished the job. We really avoid using this actual verb in the past tense. We don't even realize that we're avoiding it, right? But it's true. Yeah.

But you could also use hard, dull work with grind as a noun, right? So you could say, this day has been a grind. And this is even more common, I think. We use this all the time. Like, back at the grind on Monday. Back to the grind. Back to the grind, meaning like, I had a weekend and now I'm like back at active work. Some things are repetitive at work, right? We call it the grind. The grind. Yep. Yep.

So let's talk about one more, Aubrey, right? Grounds. Tell us about this. Yeah, because this listener asked about grind, grounds, and then past tense of grind. So grounds also has a few meanings. First up, ground up coffee beans. Like we were saying at the beginning of the show, you know, I spilled coffee grounds all over the counter. This is why I don't use grounds. I use like little Keurig cups because I just don't want to deal with the mess. Yeah. Yeah.

But I'm sure a lot of coffee enthusiasts are horrified by that because they're using fresh grounds. It's so much more delicious and aromatic, I'm sure. Yeah. Oh, aromatic. That's a good bonus word for today. I love that. Yeah. Now I'm just imagining all this fresh coffee. So that's good. Maybe I need to start doing fresh grounds. It's worth the mess to have more delicious coffee, I'm sure.

Yeah.

Or you could use it meaning the reason or knowledge a belief is based on. So grounds for doing something. So the employee was dismissed on the grounds of misconduct, right? So the reason why that happened, right? Exactly. We hear this a lot on like legal shows, right? What is the grounds for that? What's the reason? What was the excuse? Yeah, very good.

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All right. Let's dive into a role play. You and I are roommates in this role play, Michelle. Okay. An alternate universe. A parallel universe where we need to be roommates. Exactly. We'd be good roommates. I think so. Yeah.

All right. Here we go. Ooh, we're almost out of coffee grounds. I'll pick up some from... Okay. My gosh. Today is my day for mistakes. Here we go. I'm going to start again. Okay. We're almost out of coffee grounds. I'll pick some up from the store today. Oh, thanks. Where do you get them, by the way? Do they grind them for you? Yeah. I just get them from the grocery store and there's a machine there I use to grind them. Oh.

Oh, well, thanks for doing that. I'll get them next time. Sounds good. How's work going, by the way? I remember you said last week was a real grind. This week is better. I've been taking breaks to walk on the grounds by the courthouse, and that's doing wonders for my mental health. Awesome. Bye.

Fun. Okay, let's go through this. I was trying to figure out how to squeeze in grounds for like illegal. I'm a lawyer. On what grounds? It just wouldn't really be used in an everyday conversation like this among roommates. Right. I feel like it's such a formal term. You'll hear it in a courthouse, maybe at work, right? He was fired on the grounds of whatever the excuse was, whatever the reason was. But to squeeze it into a conversation between roommates would feel strange. Forced. Yeah.

Exactly. So I said, we're almost out of coffee grounds. So the little dust particles of coffee that make that delicious. Exactly, right? When we grind up those coffee beans, that's what we end up. We call them grounds once they're ground up. And then I said, oh, where do you get those? Do they grind them for you? So this is a just like I've never bought coffee, which could happen, right? Or I've at least never

Maybe it's interesting. I'm thinking about this as roommates who maybe I have always used like Keurig pods. Yeah. And so you're saying, I'm going to go get the fresh ground coffee. And I'm like, wow, where do you do that? I don't even know. Right, right, right. So you're trying to learn. And then I said, yeah, I get them from the grocery store. There's a machine there I use to grind them.

So I'm asking, so this is that verb grind. And, you know, I'm asking if they grind them. This is the machine that grinds them. And then we dive straight into this other use of talking about a difficult job, like calling work a grind. Especially if things, if you have a ton on your to-do list, you're kind of drowning, that's when you might call it a grind. Because a lot of people's jobs, if it's easier or stress-free, you wouldn't necessarily call it a grind, right? Right.

Right. True. Yeah, that's true. So yeah, I said, how's work going? I said, I remember you said last week was a real grind. And I like how we added real there. That's very common. A real grind, right? Yes, exactly. Oh, it is a real grind. Yeah, that's an interesting way to say it. And that's a very commonly allocated that way. Yeah, I agree. And then I said, oh, it's better because I've been taking breaks to walk on the grounds by the courthouse.

So it's interesting because I would not call like my front yard grounds. It's different, right? It's usually like a bigger building. More fenced in or gated in. But if there were like a palace, like Versailles in...

has grounds, right? These big, beautiful gardens with fountains and flowers, those we would call the grounds of the palace. But definitely not something we would describe a regular house. No, no. That's a good point, Aubrey. So, Anne, we wanted to teach you one more idiom. I love this. This is very common, which is

stay grounded. Now, what does that mean, Aubrey? Yeah. So this is a little preview for a follow-up episode because this idiom, and there are a lot of other ways we say this in English, right? Even though it has the word ground here, grounded, has a very different meaning. So definitely hit follow for an episode on this idiom, stay grounded and related phrases. Hit follow right here on All Ears English.

Awesome. Well, takeaway for today, Aubrey, I would say, yeah, guys, today's vocab, it's going to help you connect over coffee habits, your daily routine so much. This is really, really useful. And of course, we're going to say don't let learning vocab be a grind. And any other episode we want to direct our listeners to Aubrey?

Yes. So that episode you and Lindsay did, Allers English 2391, scroll up if you missed it, was how to connect over coffee habits in English. This is another interesting thing to ask about if people use fresh grounds or not, right? So there's so many ways to connect over your coffee drinking.

Yes. Love it. All right, Aubrey. Thanks so much. This was really fun. This episode was not a grind with you. No, I agree. Yes. Hope it wasn't a grind for you guys. And I'm excited for you to use this fun vocabulary to connect in English. Awesome. All right, Aubrey. Have a good one. See you soon. See you next time. Bye. Bye.

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