Your English Five a Day #23.3

E231: 🎙️ Welcome to The English Like a Native Podcast with me, Anna! Dive into Week 23, Day 3 of Your English Five a Day, where I take you on a linguistic journey to expand your active vocabulary.

💖 First on today's list, we learn the meaning of the adjective "unwavering". Next up, we discover the idiom "a labour of love" and the adjective "immense". After that, we delve into the verb "plague" and we finish off the list with the noun "spectrum".

🧙🏽‍♀️ As always, we practise pronunciation of today's words and phrases, and do a quick memory test before we hear the enchanting story of Lily, a young witch determined to find a cure for an illness plaguing the wizarding world. Despite being surrounded by challenges, Lily embarks on a perilous journey to find Merlin's wand, believed to possess immense healing power.

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Transcript

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Hello and welcome to The English Like a Native Podcast. My name is Anna and you're listening to Week 23, Day 3 of Your English Five a Day. This is the series where we expand your active vocabulary by deep-diving into five pieces every day of the working week from Monday to Friday. So, let's kick off today's list with the adjective unwavering. Unwavering. We spell this U N W A V E R I N G. Unwavering. Now if you're someone who struggles with differentiating between the W and the V sounds, this is a good word to work on because we have wave, wave in the middle. Unwavering. Unwavering. If something is described as unwavering, then it is firm and steady. We would describe a person as unwavering if they don't show any doubt, if they don't falter in any way. So, if I say to you, I am very strict about the food that I eat. I've been following this new healthy eating regime for a number of weeks now. And if I stick to that, and I don't suddenly get tempted to eat a doughnut or a cake or a biscuit. No matter how hard you try to tempt me, if I continue to stick to my guns and say,"No, I'm not going to eat that naughty item of food!" That ultra-processed food, I'm not going to eat it because it's not part of my regime. Then you'd say,"Wow, Anna is unwavering in her new healthy eating regime. She will not be tempted. She's doing a good job." So, to be resolute, I would say, is another word you could use here to be firm. Here's another example,"Despite the challenges, Robyn remained unwavering in her commitment to achieving her goals." I'll just point out there that the name Robyn in the UK can be a girl's name or a boy's name. If it's a boy's name, it's usually spelt R O B I N. And if it's a girl's name, it would be spelt R O B Y N. Obviously, I'm sure there are exceptions to the rules. People can write their names however they like. Some people write my name with one N, even though on my birth certificate it's two Ns. But some people like to write it with one N, and I'm okay with that. So, robin is also a bird. A very popular bird here in the UK. The Robin Redbreast, a red-breasted bird that is usually solo, it's usually on its own, and it's called the gardener's helper because you'll usually find it around the garden when you're gardening because it likes to watch you dig up the soil so it can find the worms. We love a little robin here in the UK. You'll find them on Christmas cards and all sorts of things. I think I've even got a robin decoration, a little ornament for my Christmas tree. Okay, so, that was a complete tangent. I'm sorry. I went off on a tangent. I got sidetracked, but that was unwavering. So, let's move on to the next piece on today's list. It is an idiom or a noun phrase, and it is a labour of love. A labour of love. So, we're spelling it, labour, L A B O U R. Labour. Of, O F. Love. L O V E. A labour of love. So, labour means usually like work or a chore, something that's hard. A labour of love is something that you work on because you love it, because you're passionate about it. So, it's a task or activity that takes a lot of effort and a lot of dedication in order to gain or to improve, but you love it or you feel obligated to do it. So, you do it anyway. So, for example, if I was building a house with my own hands and I was literally laying brick after brick and doing everything by hand myself without any help, it would take me a very long time. You know, it might take me a decade and people would look at me and say,"Anna, why are you doing this? This must have cost you a fortune. It certainly cost you a decade of your life. You're breaking your back every day. Working so slowly on building this house brick by brick, you could just hire a contractor and some builders and some cheaper building material and get the house finished in a few months." And I say,"No, no, I want to do this my way. It's a labour of love. I am so passionate about building this house myself, by hand, using original materials that I think are perfect for this house that I'm building. I don't want to cut corners. I don't want anyone else involved. I'm going to do it my way. It's a labour of love." Here's another example,"Painting this mural was a true labour of love for the artist, who spent countless hours perfecting every detail." Can you think of a labour of love that you have worked on in your life? When I was doing my art A-Level, when I was 16, 17 years old and I was doing my A-Levels, my art project was to make a swan out of bark. So, I wanted the feathers to be bark. So, I used chicken wire to make the structure of the swan and then had to somehow try to fix bark all over this chicken wire in order to create the feathers. It was really hard work. So, I decided to give up on that one. I didn't get very far because I couldn't make the bark, which was mostly mouldy and moist. I couldn't make it stick to the chicken wire. So, I gave up on that project after a few weeks and I decided instead, I'm going to build a ship, quite a large like galleon out of matchsticks. So, I was painstakingly glueing all these teeny-tiny matchsticks together in order to make this huge ship. It was a labour of love. I didn't have to do it. The teacher didn't say, this is what you must do in order to get your art A-Level. I wanted to do it. I felt passionate about it. Okay. So, let's carry on. Next on our list is the adjective immense. Immense. We spell this I M M E N S E. Immense. If something is described as being immense, then it's huge or great in size, or it is a large amount of something. So, if I say,"My love for you is immense." Then I'm saying that I have a large amount of love for you. My dedication to my English learners and to my listeners is immense, and I have immense respect for my Fluency Programme students who put in a lot of hard work and dedication to their studies and achieve great things. I have immense respect for them. I have a large amount of respect for them. Here's another example,"The immense mountain range stretched as far as the eye could see." Oh, I do love being in the mountains, don't you? When you can look out from a high viewpoint to see just an immense valley of mountains, an immense mountain range, just like when you're skiing and you have a clear day. Anyway, I am in a chatterbox mood today, aren't I? Just going off on a tangent every two seconds. Let's come back to the list. Next, we have a verb and it is plague. Plague. Pay attention to the spelling here. P L A G U E. Plague. Plague. So, to plague someone or if something plagues you, then it causes you trouble or distress or torment. I could be plagued by criticism or I might be plagued by back problems. Or I could say,"The garden was plagued by disease and infestations." So, to be bothered, to be distressed, to be troubled continuously by something, just like a plague, a plague. The disease is a kind of relentless, persistent, unpleasant disease. And so, if you are plagued, then you are constantly troubled. Here's another example,"The town was plagued by a series of robberies, causing fear and unease among its residents." Okay, so, let's move on to our last piece. We have a noun, and it is spectrum. Spectrum. We spell this S P E C T R U M. Spectrum. Spectrum. Spectrum just means a range basically. So, a range of opinions, a range of ideas. Here's an example sentence,"It seems that the two parties are at opposite ends of the political spectrum. They need to come together if they are going to run this town efficiently." So, you'll often hear spectrum being used with'end'. So, we'll say,"He's at one end of the spectrum," or"He's at the other end of the spectrum," or"They are at opposite ends of the spectrum." So, just think of it as the word'range'. Okay, so, that's our five pieces for today. Let's do a quick recap. We started with the adjective unwavering, which means that you are steady, you are firm and resolute. Then we had the idiom a labour of love, which is an activity or task that you do, even if it's hard because you're passionate about it. Then we had the adjective immense, which means a great amount of. Then we had the verb plague, which is to cause continual trouble or distress. And we finally had the noun spectrum. Spectrum, which is a range of something, ideas, opinions, objects, et cetera. Okay, so let's do this for pronunciation. Please repeat after me. Unwavering. Unwavering. A labour of love. A labour of love. Immense. Immense. Plague. Plague. Spectrum. Spectrum. Very good. Alright, now is the time to test your memory. So, I am going to go out into the garden and cut my beautiful lawn, not with a lawnmower, but I'm going to cut it by hand with a pair of scissors. And you're going to tell me that that's ridiculous, that it will take me too long, but I care for my lawn greatly, and I don't dare put a machine on my lawn. I'm going to cut it by hand. What idiom could you use to describe me doing this task, this very difficult task, because I care? What idiom would you use? It's a labour of love. Absolutely. And I spend all day, every day for over a week, hand cutting or hand trimming my lawn. And even though I suffer with backache, even though the weather was, you know, terrible at times, really hot some days, torrential rain other days, I was steady and resolute in my determination to cut this lawn by hand. What adjective could you use to describe how steady I am? Unwavering. I am unwavering in my determination here. I am going to continue with my labour of love until it's done. And once it is done, I have an extreme amount of pride in my work. I look at the lawn and I'm filled with this extreme amount of pride. What adjective could we use to describe this large amount of pride I'm feeling? Immense pride, absolutely. I'm feeling immense pride. However, because I spent an entire week bent over trimming my lawn, my labour of love, I am now constantly troubled by this pain in my back, this constant niggling pain that will not go away. What verb could we use to describe this action of troubling me constantly? Plagued. I'm plagued. I'm plagued by back pain. Now, when I go and see the doctor, he asks me to tell him what side of the range I'm sitting on in terms of the amount of pain. How immense is the pain? He says,"At one end of the range, you've got just a general dull ache, like you get when you've sat in one position for too long. And at the other end of the range, it's insane, immense pain, and that means you can't do your daily activities and you have to take painkillers all the time. What end of the range do you sit at?" says the doctor. But what could he use instead of the word range? Spectrum. He could use the word spectrum. So, what end of the spectrum are you with this back pain? Are you at the low end of the spectrum or are you at the immense unbearable side of the spectrum? I'd say,"Probably right in the middle to be honest." Okay, so there we had my little story about my unwavering determination to trim my lawn by hand because it's a labour of love and being filled with immense pride when I finish and look at the lawn, but then being plagued by terrible back pain after completing this labour of love, but telling the doctor that although it's a constant pain that I'm dealing with and I'm being plagued by, I tell him that my pain is probably right in the middle of the spectrum. That is not that serious. So, let's bring those pieces all together one last time in today's story. Lily sat at her desk, surrounded by piles of old books and scrolls. She should have been outside flying free with all the other young witches, but Lily was on a mission, to find a cure for the illness that had recently plagued the wizarding world. Lily's parents, both renowned healers, had fallen victim to the illness and she refused to let it take any more lives. With determination in her heart, she pored over every page, trying to find a solution. It was a labour of love, as Lily had always been fascinated by the healing arts. She had spent countless hours in her parents' chemist, learning about different herbs and potions, but this was no ordinary illness. It seemed to defy all known remedies. As she delved deeper into her research, Lily came across a rare book, hidden in the depths of her parents' library. It spoke of a powerful wizard who had the ability to heal any disease, no matter how grave. His name was Merlin, and he was said to have a wand that could harness the full spectrum of magic. Determined to find this wand, Lily embarked on a journey to the land of Camelot, where Merlin was said to have lived. It was a dangerous journey, filled with challenges and obstacles, but Lily pressed on, driven by her love for her parents and her desire to find a cure. Finally, after many months of travel, Lily arrived at the gates of Camelot. She was greeted by the wise wizard himself, who listened intently to her story. With a twinkle in his eye, he handed her a wand made of the finest wood and adorned with rare gems. It was indeed a wand of immense power, capable of healing any illness. With this wand in hand, Lily returned to her village and used it to cure her parents and all those who had been affected by the deadly disease. Her bravery and unwavering determination had saved countless lives and she was hailed as a hero throughout the wizarding world. And that, ladies and gentlemen, brings us to the end of today's episode. If you did enjoy today's episode, please consider leaving a like, a rating, or a review. And be sure to recommend the ELAN Podcast to any of your English language learning friends. Until tomorrow, take very good care. And goodbye.