Useful English Vocabulary From a Short Story Extract [528]

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If you’ve struggled to remember English vocabulary, this method makes it easier. In this episode, we read a short extract from The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise and focus on useful vocabulary from the text. You’ll learn new words in context, which makes them easier to understand and remember. I explain key expressions clearly so you can improve both your vocabulary and listening skills at the same time.

This episode is ideal for intermediate and advanced English learners who want to improve their vocabulary, build fluency, and speak more natural English. It’s also a useful way to prepare for English proficiency exams like IELTS, TOEFL, or CAE, and build confidence in real conversations. 

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Transcript

0:09

Hi there, this is Harry and welcome back to Advanced English Lessons with Harry where I try to help you to get a better understanding of the English language. So anything that you need, you know where to contact me, www.englishlessonviaskype.com. I'm always very, very happy to hear from you. Now, in this particular lesson, I'm actually going to do something very different. We haven't done it before. I'm going to introduce you to a book, a fictional book that I really, really love. I'm going to read a passage, not a long passage, a passage from the book. And then I'm going to go through that passage and pick out some advanced words and expressions that I think you'll find useful. So this is going to have lots of different benefits for you. Okay, so here's the book. It's called The Tower, the Zoo and the Tortoise. The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise. So here it is. And the author of this book, okay, this author of this book is called Julius Stewart. And as the title suggests, The Tower, the Zoo and the Tortoise. It's about the Tower of London. So it's all set in the Tower of London. And those of you who have visited London will know some of the history about the Tower. It's about animals in the Tower of London. So it's fictional. And of course, one particular animal that happens to be the pet of the key character of this book is the tortoise. Okay, so the main character in our book is a beef eater. He's a beef eater or gets a job as the beef eater because he's not originally. So he gets a job as a beef eater in the Tower of London. Again, if you have visited the Tower of London, you will see them at the entrance, you'll see them inside, and centuries ago, they used to be used to guard the jewels, and they were fed very well, so to stop them from stealing the jewels, and because they had such an important job to guard the royal jewels, so they were paid, well, in food. So they often were given beef, and beef wasn't so easy to get for the common person. So this is where the expression beef eater came from, that they were fed or paid using food and beef. So, you know, the traditional English dish of roast beef. So they were fed with beef. And always the pictures of the beef eaters are quite stout men. So you can imagine that they did eat plenty of beef. So that's the name beef eaters. And they had, and still do today, although it's only ceremonial now, they have red uniforms and a flat black hat. Okay, so I'm going to go down through some of the key characters now. Let me get you the characters. So the cast of the characters, the two main people are a husband and wife. And the husband is the beef eater, who gets the job as the beef eater. And his name is Balthazar Jones. So B-A-L-T-H-A-Z-A-R. Balthazar Jones. He's the beef eater or the overseer of the zoo within the Tower of London. And his wife, Hebe, H-E-B-E, Hebe Jones, okay, and she works in the London Underground and she works in the lost property office of the London Underground. And very funny stories in the book about various items that appear or turn up in the lost property office. So they give you some quite amusing parts to the book. Mrs. Cook. Now, Mrs. Cook is not a cook at all. She's nothing to do with the kitchens. This is the name of the tortoise. And the tortoise is the 181-year-old tortoise or the pet belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Jones. So this is the story of the tortoise. Hebe Jones, whose own earnings were modest, knew that their savings would never stretch to the university education they both wanted for their son. Ignoring the dread that set like cement in her guts, she dismissed her husband's warning that they would have to live at the tower if he were successful. It's every woman's dream to live in a castle, she lied, not turning round from the stove. When Balthazar Jones discovered that she had never visited the famous monument, he asked how it was possible since she had spent most of her childhood in London. She explained that her parents had only ever taken their four daughters to the British Museum to see the Elgin marbles. The sound of Mr. and Mrs. Grammaticus weeping as they stood in front of the Greek exhibits pilfered by the English was so catastrophic that the family was eventually banned from the museum for life. The couple consequently refused to visit any British landmarks, a protest Hebe Jones had kept up in adulthood out of familial solidarity. In case his wife wasn't aware, Balthazar Jones pointed out that not only was the Tower of London a royal palace and fortress, but it had once been England's state prison, had witnessed numerous executions, and was also widely believed to be haunted. But Hebe Jones simply disappeared into the garden shed and emerged with a blue and white striped deck chair. She sat down and pulled out of a shopping bag a guide to the tower that she had purchased to prepare her husband for his interview. With the ruthlessness of a gunner, she started to fire questions at the man who had failed the history O-level to such a spectacular degree that the astonished marker kept a copy of his paper to cheer herself up during her most debilitating bouts of depression. Hebe Jones maintained the battery as her husband paced up and down the lawn, scratching the back of his neck as he searched for the answers in the empty birdcage of his head. His wife's determination was absolute. Balthazar Jones would receive a call at lunchtime, asking not what he fancied for supper, but the name of the woman who was sent to the tower in the 13th century for rejecting the advances of King John, who subsequently poisoned her with an egg. She would return home from work and inquire not how her husband's day had been, but in which tower the Duke of Clarence had been drowned in a bat of his favourite Malsey wine. Bathed in sweat after love-making, she would lift her head from his chest and demand that he revealed not the depth of his devotion for her, but the name of the 17th century thief who made it as far as the tower wharf with the crown jewels. By the time the job offer arrived in the post, Balthazar Jones' brain had been unsettled by so much English history that it provoked in him a mania for the subject that afflicted him for the rest of his life. So let me read that again. It's a second time might be a better reading this time. Okay. Hebe Jones, whose own earnings were modest, knew that their savings would never stretch to the university education they both wanted for their son. Ignoring the dread that set like cement in her guts, she dismissed her husband's warning that they would have to live at the tower if he were successful. It's every woman's dream to live in a castle, she lied, not turning round from the stove. When Balthazar Jones discovered that she had never visited the famous monument, he asked how it was possible, since she had spent most of her childhood in London. She explained that her parents had only ever taken their four daughters to the British Museum to see the Elgin marbles. The sound of Mr. and Mrs. Grammaticus weeping as they stood in front of the Greek exhibits pilfered by the English was so catastrophic that the family was eventually banned from the museum for life. The couple consequently refused to visit any British landmarks, a protest Hebe Jones had kept up in adulthood out of familial solidarity. In case his wife wasn't aware, Althazar Jones pointed out that not only was the Tower of London a royal palace and fortress, but it had once been England's state prison, had witnessed numerous executions, and was also widely believed to be haunted. But Hebe Jones simply disappeared into the garden shed and emerged with a blue and white striped deck chair. She sat down and pulled out of a shopping bag a guide to the tower that she had purchased to prepare her husband for his interview. With the ruthlessness of a gunner, she started to fire questions at the man who had failed his history O-level to such a spectacular degree that the astonished marker kept a copy of his paper to cheer herself up during her most debilitating bouts of depression. Hebe Jones maintained the battery as her husband paced up and down the lawn, scratching the back of his neck as he searched for the answers in the empty bird cage of his head. His wife's determination was absolute. Balthazar Jones would receive a call at lunchtime asking not what he fancied for supper, but the name of the woman who was sent to the tower in the 13th century for rejecting the advances of King John, who subsequently poisoned her with an egg. She would return home from work and inquire not how her husband's day had been, but in which tower the Duke of Clarence had been drowned in a bat of his favourite Malmaze wine. Bathed in sweat, after love-making, she would lift her head from his chest and demand that he revealed not the depth of his devotion for her, but the name of the 17th century thief who made it as far as the tower wharf with the crown jewels. By the time the job offer arrived in the post, Balthazar Jones' brain had been unsettled by so much English history that it provoked in him a mania for the subject that afflicted him for the rest of his life. Okay, so that's the ending of the passage, pages 22 and 23 of the book. So what I'm going to do now is pick out some words I've selected that I think you'll enjoy. And for those of you and your friends or family who want one-to-one lessons, well, you know what to do. Just get in touch, www.englishlessonviaskype.com and you can apply for a free try lesson and we'll be very happy to hear from you and very happy to help you. So the first one is to stretch to. And she says in the book, this is about her own personal earnings. She knew that their savings would never stretch to. Okay, so what she was talking about there is that they had some savings, but they would be not nearly enough to cover the university costs for their son. So when you have to stretch to something, it means you have to make it last for a long time. So if they had 5,000 Euro, for example, in the bank as a savings, it would never stretch to nearly enough to cover a very expensive university course or not, an even modest university course. So to stretch to. Now, other ways in which we can use stretch to, you might be out for a meal with your partner and it's maybe a modest but keenly priced menu and your wife says, do you think we could have a dessert or do you think we could have another glass of wine? And you might say jokingly, oh, I think the budget will stretch to that, meaning I think we have enough money in the budget to afford another glass of wine or indeed to afford a dessert. Okay, so to stretch to means, will there be enough to cover that extra glass of wine or that extra dessert? The second word or the verb here is to weep. Okay, so to weep means to cry. So it's another way to cry. Somebody was weeping because their pet had died. Okay, so to weep means to cry. So it could simply have said she was crying, but weeping gives a little bit more explanation and it's a little bit more colorful description of how the emotions were to weep. I think when they were using it about her parents, she is Greek, so when she went initially to the museum with her parents when she was young, that her mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. Grammaticus, as they were called, were weeping as they stood in front of the Elgin marbles. And the Elgin marbles were these particular pieces of Greek history that apparently the British stole at some stage during their conquests. And they are sitting in the British Museum. And as an argument, be going back and forwards for many, many decades as to whether the British are eventually going to return them to the rightful owners. So her parents, who were Greek, were weeping because the fact that they could see the Elgin model. So to weep, the verb to weep, weeping in that continuous format. To pilfer, another verb, to pilfer. And to pilfer is quite an old-fashioned and formal way about stealing. So when you pilfer something, it's not big amounts or huge things that have been stolen, but to pilfer usually refers to small things. So maybe some kids in the sweet shop pilfer some sweets. They slide them into their pockets and slip out of the shop without being noticed. It's obviously still bad and it's a crime, but it's not a huge crime, but they pilfer something. But here, when she refers to it in the book, it's again about these Elgin marbles where these were pilfered by the English during some war. So to be pilfered means they were robbed and stolen and taken away secretly and then placed in the museum, in the British Museum in London. So to pilfer, to steal or to take, and usually taken without anybody's notice, sorry. Next, to keep up. So this is a phrasal verb, to keep up. So when you keep something up, you prevent it from falling. So you might wear a belt on your trousers to keep them up so they don't fall down. You might put a hook on the wall to hang a painting or to keep the painting up on the wall. Or you could simply talk to somebody all night, chit-chat, chatting away, and you'll keep them up, means you prevent them from falling asleep. Okay, so it has many, many different uses. So to keep up, and what she does again, there when they're talking about Hebe Jones, when she was having this protest about going to museums, she kept up in adulthood, means she maintained her protest against the museums. So she refused to visit the museums because she was supporting the family tradition because of the Elgin marbles. Okay, so she kept up her protest against the Elgin marbles. And to keep up in this instance means to maintain or to sustain the protest. So to keep up. But as I've just given you some examples, there are many other ways in which you can use the same expression. To point out, well, when you point out something, you indicate it to somebody. So if you're standing on the beach and you're looking into the ocean, you can point out a yacht sailing along the horizon, or you can point out a particular landmass that you're looking at, or you can point out a tree or a landmark in the distance where you're going to walk towards. Okay, so to point out means to indicate. And in the book, when we're talking about point out, we're talking about the husband, Mr. Jones, says to Mrs. Jones, he pointed out that not only was the Tower of London a royal palace and fortress, so he pointed out, he indicated or he highlighted the fact that the Tower of London was not only a palace and a fortress, but it was also once the main or state prison or jail. So to point out, to indicate, to highlight. So if you're making a presentation to your colleagues, you might point out some key facts. So on page one or slide one of your PowerPoint presentation, you might point out some key facts. Next, to emerge. So emerge, to emerge. So when you emerge, you come from one place into another. So if you emerge from a building, you might walk out the front door or the back door. Okay. If you emerge from a cave where it's been dark, you come out into the light, the bright light, and you put your hand over your eyes to shade your eyes from the brightness or the reflection of the sun because you've been in a dark place for a little while. So you emerge from that. So when we look at in the book for the reference to emerge, when he's talking, well, Mr. Jones is talking to his wife, she ignores him and she goes into the garden shed and she emerges a few minutes later with this blue and white striped deck chair. So she ignored him completely, went into the garden shed, came out. So she emerged from the garden shed with the blue and white deck chair. To pull out. Okay, when you pull out something, you remove it, okay? You go to the dentist and you've got a bad tooth. He said, I'm really, really sorry, Harry. I'm going to have to pull out the tooth. It's really bad. So he extracts it. He takes an extraction, takes the tooth out of your mouth. So it can be quite painful. So to pull out. Or if there's a rock concert coming to your city or town, and then one of the key stars pulls out of the concert due to illness, there'll be an announcement on the radio, in the newspapers, on the internet to say that such and such a star has had to be forced to pull out of the concert due to illness or some other problem, insurance problems or whatever the issues were, he's had to pull out. So to remove himself or to stop going or just to cancel. In the book, again, when she has taken the deck chair from the garden shed, she sits on the deck chair and from her handbag or her shopping bag, she pulls out a guide to the Tower of London. So this is where she starts her preparation to get her husband prepared for the job interview. So she pulls out, she removes from the shopping bag this guidebook that she's purchased to pull out. Now we've got a next one, we've got an expression, ruthlessness of a gunner. Ruthlessness of a gunner. A gunner is somebody who fires a gun. So if you're a member of the army, you might be an artilleryman, a gunner. Or if you're a member of the Air Force, you might be a gunner in a particular part of the plane. In fact, my father, who flew during the Second World War in the Royal Air Force, he was what they called a rear gunner. So he used to lie flat on his stomach at the very back of the plane, and he would be operating the machine gun. So he was a gunner. So here the expression is, with the ruthlessness of a gunner, she started to fire questions. So she wasn't firing bullets or ammunition. She was firing questions. Question after question after question to her husband to see what answers he had. And he had a very bad IQ, as because we read in the book that he failed his O-level history quite badly. Okay, so but she, with the ruthlessness of a gunner, was determined to get him prepared. Okay, so ruthlessness means you take no prisoners. So when you're ruthless, then you are not accepting any excuses. So she decided, we're going to prepare you for this interview, and I'm going to be ruthless. I'm going to continue asking and asking you these questions until you get them right. So ruthless. And again, we have this ruthless of a gunner to fire questions. So to fire questions, as I said, is one after another repeated, like a repeat weapon. It just fires. You press the trigger and bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. So she was going to fire questions in much the same way as you would fire bullets from a rifle. Repeat one after another. One, one, the second, the third, the fourth, and so on. So the poor man didn't know what to do. He was strolling up and down the garden, scratching his head, trying to figure out the answers to these particular questions. Now, we've got another expression to cheer herself up. So when we refer back to the poor old Mr. Jones and his terrible marks in his O level, O levels of the exams that young boys and girls do when they're around 15 in the UK, they're called O-levels. And in his particular case, he failed his history O-level quite seriously to such an extent that the marker, the examiner for this, kept a copy of his particular exam because she was so amused by it that she used it to cheer herself up when she had bouts of depression. So she wasn't so healthy and she had problems with her mind and she was depressed from time to time. But what would cheer her up, which would put her in a good mood, was reading the answers that Balthazar Jones had submitted in the questions for his history O level. So when you cheer yourself up, it means you make yourself feel happy. So I cheer myself up by reading books. Some other people cheer themselves up by doing some exercise. Others might cheer themselves up by having a glass of wine. So to cheer yourself up means to put you in a happy mood, to put you in a better mood. So what will cheer you up? Oh, why don't we cheer ourselves up and we'll watch a funny movie? So to cheer yourselves up, to put yourself or him or herself in a better mood. Next one, quite difficult, so be careful with the pronunciation on this one. Debilitating bouts. Debilitating bouts. Debilitating means something that continuously gets worse and worse. So if you have a debilitating illness, it starts off bad and becomes more serious. So something debilitating begins to wear you down and gets worse and worse. And in this expression, they say debilitating bouts. So a bout is something that is not permanent, but it's a short period of time. So this examiner, this person who examined Barthes R. Jones' history O levels, suffered from bouts of depression. So a bout is a small or short period of depression. It might last hours or days or weeks, but it wasn't permanent. So she had debilitating bouts, meaning bad bouts that made her feel really bad. So what she did when she had these debilitating bouts of depression, she took out his answers to his history and it made her feel a little bit happier because they were so stupid, perhaps, and so badly wrong. Okay, so debilitating bouts. And then finally, we have this expression, he paced up and down, paced up and down. So it means he went in one direction, turned around, came back in the other direction, turned around, went up like a band marching up and down, like soldiers going up and down. Straight line up, straight line back, up and down. So to pace up and down doesn't mean to run. It doesn't mean to walk fast. Paced at a set step. Yeah. One, two, three, four. Turn around. One, two, three, four. He paced up and down. If you watch the football matches when the coach for the team paces up and down the touchline, trying to get involved in the match, trying to get his players to get involved, but he can't do anything because he's not on the pitch. So he paces up and down. He walks up and down, back and forth. Okay, so this is what we mean by to pace up and down. Okay, so there are the expressions and phrases and words that I've just taken just from those two pages. They're very interesting. They're easy to use, to understand, and you can practice those. So let me go through them one more time. To stretch to means to cover. To weep, to cry. To pilfer, to take, to rob, to steal. To keep up means to prevent somebody from doing something or to continue something. To point out, to indicate to somebody. To emerge, to come from one room into another, from dark into the light, to emerge. To pull out means to take out from your bag or remove. Ruthlessness of a gunner. I mean, when you're ruthless, you don't take any prisoners. You don't make any excuses. You just do it. Ruthlessness of a gunner. To fire questions. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Rapid, one after the other. To cheer herself up, to make herself feel happy. Debilitating bouts, periods of depression, debilitating bouts. Something wears you down, makes you feel really bad. You know, when you get these headaches constantly, they can be very debilitating, make you feel unwell. And then finally, to pace up and down, to walk up and down at a set pace, at a set step. One, two, three, four. Okay, well, that's the end of this particular lesson. A little bit different. It's all about reading and enjoying and listening and all the words in it. But hopefully, as I said, it's lit that little fire that you might need to pick up an English book, order an English book, look it up online, but get yourself actively involved in reading. I'll read a few other passages from this book in the future. If you like what we've done, let me know and I'll pick out a few more. Okay, this is Harry thanking you. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. As always, join me for the next lesson.