The English We Speak: Grind someone's gears
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Hello and welcome to The English We Speak, where we explain phrases used by fluent English speakers so that you can use them too.

I'm Feifei and I'm joined by Georgie. How are you doing? Well, I'm feeling calm now, but this morning all the trains to work were cancelled, so I had to get the bus instead. It really grinds my gears when that happens without warning or explanation. Oh, tell me about it. Well, grind someone's gears is the expression we're looking at in this programme.

Train cancellations without warning grind your gears, Georgie. So what does that mean? Well, if something grinds your gears, it really annoys you. What grinds your gears, Feifei? When people eat really crunchy things sitting next to me in the office, that really grinds my gears. Yeah, I can understand that one.

Now, this phrase is usually used in the present simple to talk about things which generally annoy you. So you can start a sentence with, it grinds my gears when… or you could say, that really grinds my gears. Yes, you wouldn't usually hear it in other forms like it ground my gears or it was grinding my gears to talk about things that happen once. Use it for things which happen often. Let's hear some more examples. Music

Every evening when I go home, there's just so many tourists in the train station. It really grinds my gears. They get in the way with their suitcases and I'm in a rush and I just want to get home. OK, I'll tell you what really grinds my gears. When people have got something for the dishwasher and they don't put it inside, they put it next to the dishwasher. So someone, me, has to come along and put it in for them.

So I go to this coffee shop with my friend and every time I go there, it's like they've increased the price again. It really grinds my gears. Now, there are some other useful phrases to use when things annoy you. A pet peeve is a noun and it's something that annoys you. They're usually quite personal. So, for example, one of my pet peeves is people calling me without saying they're going to call me. Whereas I don't mind it when people do that.

Another phrase we can use is, it drives me up the wall. It drives me up the wall when Neil crunches his apples all the time in the office. Yeah, that is so annoying. OK, let's recap. We learnt grind someone's gears, which means annoy someone. Thanks for joining us. Bye. Goodbye.

I'm Zing Singh. And I'm Simon Jack. And together we host Good Bad Billionaire. The podcast exploring the lives of some of the world's richest people. In the new season, we're setting our sights on some big names. Yep, LeBron James and Martha Stewart, to name just a few. And as always, Simon and I are trying to decide whether we think they're good, bad or just another billionaire. That's Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.