Transcript of AE 961 - Expression: In The Belly of The Beast

G'day, you mob and welcome to Aussie English. I am your host Pete, and my objective here is to teach you guys the English spoken down under. So, whether you want to sound like a fair dinkum Aussie or you just want to understand what the flipping hell we're on about when we're having a yarn, you've come to the right place. So, sit back, grab a cuppa and enjoy Aussie English. Let's go.

G'day, you mob. How's it going? Welcome to this episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So, this is your one stop shop for everything Australia, right. Fair dinkum Aussie English, culture, news, current affairs, history, all the works. That's the whole point of this podcast. I am your host Pete, and it's a pleasure to be here once again to bring you an expression.

Before that, let me tell you a little bit about my week. At the moment, we are just coming out of yet another lockdown. I think this is like number three or four. I can't even remember, to be honest. But yeah, every time there's a few cases in Melbourne, they seem to crap themselves and, you know, lock down the entire state. But we haven't had that many deaths in Victoria. Not- Probably none this year as far as I know.

So, we're doing okay, all things considered. But it's been a bit of a pain in the backside. It's been a bit of a pain in the bum. We've been trying to celebrate Noah's 2nd birthday; I know he's just turned 2.

And we've had to keep postponing it again and again and again because of this lockdown, because we've got a lot of friends and family from Melbourne who are meant to be coming, you know, and there's been restrictions on people coming into your house, how many people you're allowed to hang out with, how many people you can hang out with outside.

So, I think it's going to go ahead this weekend, but we'll have to do it in a park, I think, so that we can have, you know, whatever it is, 20 or 30 people there to celebrate Noah's birthday. It's funny, too, because I think this is probably the last birthday before children are aware of what a birthday is. Because we had a little mini birthday for Noah, and I don't think he had any idea what was going on.

He was just like, oh, woo, cake, presents, trucks. So, anyway, that's what I've been up to this week, guys. Don't forget, if you want to get access to the full transcripts for each of these episodes so you can read and listen at the same time, you want to use the premium podcast player, you want the downloads, including the MP3's and the video lessons for expression episodes just like this.

Make sure that you become a premium podcast member at AussieEnglish.com.au/podcast. But with that aside, guys, let's get into this week's news story. So, this week, a commercial lobster diver went on an unexpected and terrifying journey after he was swallowed whole by a whale. Michael Packard, a fisherman from Cape Cod, had dived down about 14 metres under the surface when he suddenly felt a huge bump, and everything went pitch black.

Initially, he thought he'd been attacked by a shark, which are common in the waters where he fishes. However, feeling no teeth nor any pain he quickly realised he was inside the mouth of a huge whale. Michael managed to stay calm under the circumstances, though thought this was the end and that he was surely going to die. After what must have been the longest 30 seconds of his life the whale surfaced, shook its head and spat Michael out.

Clearly, the whale had been left with a bad taste in his mouth. Despite the insane incident, Michael only suffered a few bruises and is thankful to have survived being inside the belly of the beast. So, there you go. What an incredible story, huh, guys? You see this sort of stuff in TV shows and books and, you know, stories about things like- Pinocchio would be the perfect example, right?

Where his dad gets swallowed by a whale, goes to the bottom of the ocean, and Pinocchio has to summon up his courage and go and save his dad, Giuseppe, I think it is, inside the whale. But you never think about whether or not this can actually happen in real life.

So, because of this story and this guy nearly getting swallowed by the whale and ending up inside this huge beast's belly, I decided to do the expression "the belly of the beast or in the belly of the beast, to be in the belly of the beast". Before we get into that, smack the kookaburra and let's do this week's joke. All right, so I got a whale of a joke for you guys, like it's not a big joke, but it's about a whale, right.

It's a whale of a joke. What is a whale's favourite sandwich? What is a whale's favourite sandwich? You're going to hate me. You are absolutely going to hate me. Krilled cheese. Do you get it? Krilled cheese. All right. So, this is a play on words with the expression "grilled cheese", which is where you have a sandwich.

So, you've got two pieces of bread, you probably buttered either of them and then you just put cheese inside the bread, the sandwich, and then you grill it or you put it in a sandwich iron or a sandwich maker and make a toasted cheese, grilled cheese sandwich. It's a play on that phrase, "grilled cheese" and the word "krill". This is what large baleen whales eat, right.

It is a small shrimp like planktonic crustacean from the open seas, and it's eaten by a huge number of animals, including baleen whales. These are whales that have sheets of baleen in their mouths, they don't have teeth and they use this to sift through the water. So, they come up and take these huge gulps of water and hopefully bring a bunch of food into their mouth and they sift the food out from the water using the baleen.

And krill are those small orange kind of shrimp. Right. So, krilled cheese. What is a whale's favourite sandwich? Krilled cheese. There you go. So, before we get into the expression "belly of the beast" and what it means, let's break down the two words in this expression, "belly and beast". Well, the two interesting words, two interesting words. So, a "belly", this is the front part of a human trunk below the ribs containing the stomach and bowels.

But it can also be the stomach, especially representing the body's need for food. So, it can be the stomach inside your stomach, I guess. That's kind of confusing, isn't it? So, we can use "stomach and belly" to refer to the outside of our bodies, right. Hitting our tummies, our stomachs, our bellies. But then we can also use it to refer to what's on the inside the "stomach", and that's inside your "belly".

You know that you may know that famous line from Austin Powers where the really big guy says, get in my belly and he's talking about wanting the baby or whatever it is that he's wanting to eat. He's talking about wanting to eat it and get it into his stomach, into his "belly". The other word, "beast, a beast". A "beast" is an animal, especially a large or dangerous four-footed animal, right.

So, a four-footed animal, an animal with four legs or four feet, one that's usually seen on land. So, you might see a moose in- I don't know, you might see this in Europe or in North America and you think, whoa, that is a huge "beast". But a bear could be a "beast" or a wolverine could be a "beast". You might come into Australia and woah, what's that beast? Oh, it's a wombat or a koala. So, an animal is a "beast".

So, if you are "in the belly of the beast", what does this mean? "In the belly of the beast". You can imagine that if you've been swallowed by a beast, you're in probably a pretty dangerous circumstance or situation. That's exactly what it means if you are "in the belly of the beast", you are in a dangerous place.

But it can also be used for a location, a place where the main work of something is done, where the primary work is carried out and we'll get into the examples so that you can understand that in a little bit. But where did this expression come from? What's the origin of the expression "belly of the beast"? It turns out that the phrase originates from the tail of Jonah in the Bible's Old Testament.

After annoying God, Jonah hops onto a ship to escape and the all-powerful God has other plans and sets a storm in motion at sea, you know, this terrifying storm with raging waves, with winds, maybe- What are they called, again? Tornadoes at seas or these like waterspouts, you know, a huge storm.

In order to get the ocean to stop churning around the other men on the boat decide to chuck Jonah overboard, where, quote, "the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights." So, while the King James translation of the Bible calls it a great fish, other versions refer to it as a whale or a beast.

So, that is how Jonah ended up "in the belly of the beast" and that's how we got the expression "belly of the beast". So, now let's go through some everyday examples of how I would use the expression "belly of the beast" in daily English. But before we do that.

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So, if your goal is to learn and remember more vocabulary, to expand your vocab in English, make sure that you sign up to become a premium podcast member today at AussieEnglish.com.au/podcast. Let's get back to the episode. Okay, so example number one, imagine that you are a soldier in the Second World War fighting for Britain, right.

So, you have been dropped over in France and you are with your platoon fighting against the Nazis and during this firefight, you know, you're shooting at one another, somehow you find yourself behind enemy lines. So, you've ended up past where your men were and on the other side of where the Nazis are, you're behind enemy lines. As a result, you notice you're in a bad situation. It's really dangerous. The stakes are high.

You know, you're worried that you could easily be killed. You're "in the belly of the beast", right. You're in a very precarious and dangerous situation. You're "in the belly of the beast", in the thick of it, you know, really dangerous situation. Number two, and this is a real-world example. So, Peter Garrett is a famous Australian singer from the band Midnight Oil. You probably know that band, right?

How can we sleep while our beds are burning? During the 70s, 80s and 90s whilst I was growing up these guys released countless songs and albums that were all about political issues, right, and the environment, about nuclear power, about indigenous land rights and everything like that. In the 2000s, Peter Garrett decided to enter politics and became a politician for the Labour Party, you know, he wanted to make a difference.

He wanted to see what he could do as a politician to change the lives of Australian battlers, you know, and do better for the average Aussie. I'm sure a lot of his family and friends at the time, after he signed up to become a poly, to become a politician, said to him, well, now you're "in the belly of the beast", right. Now you're in the thick of it.

Now you are in a situation where you are surrounded by dodgy, dangerous, powerful people who lie, who are corrupt, who are going to use all kinds of nefarious means to control power and everything like that. You're "in the belly of the beast", right. This is the heart of making Australia- You're in the heart of decision making in Australia. You're "in the belly of the beast".

And this could be an example, too, where it's not only a dangerous situation, but you're also in the main place where work is done, right, where work is carried out. So, it's a kind of two for one here, it's a combo, could mean either of these. Example number three, imagine you're an engineer and you are working in a nuclear submarine, right. So, you're inside this submarine.

It's patrolling the oceans somewhere in the South Pacific and something goes horribly wrong inside the engine. And as an engineer, it's your job to sort it out, to fix whatever's gone wrong so that the submarine doesn't sink, and everyone ends up dead in Davy Jone's Locker. Right. Davy Jone's Locker is this kind of a metaphor for the bottom of the ocean.

So, you enter the "belly of the beast", the engine room of the submarine, and work hard to fix the engine, get it started and save the day. Right. The engine room is the "belly of the beast" in this example. It is the main place where all the work is done. It's the "belly of the beast". It is the "belly of the beast", the beast being the submarine in this case. So, there you go, guys.

Hopefully now you understand this expression "belly of the beast" to be "in the belly of the beast". This is to be in a dangerous place or in a dangerous situation. Right. But it can also be to be in the main place where work is done, where the primary work of something is carried out, whether it's an engine or a business, anything like that, where the work's carried out is the "belly of the beast".

So, as usual, guys, let's go through a little pronunciation exercise where you can work on your English pronunciation. So, listen and repeat after me. "To. To be. To be in. To be in the. To be in the belly. To be in the belly of. To be in the belly of the. To be in the belly of the beast. To be in the belly of the beast. To be in the belly of the beast. To be in the belly of the beast. To be in the belly of the beast.

I'm in the belly of the beast. You're in the belly of the beast. He's in the belly of the beast. She's in the belly of the beast. We're in the belly of the beast. They're in the belly of the beast. It's in the belly of the beast." Good job, guys. Man, so I have one little takeaway here that I want you to get from the exercises that we've just gone through.

I tried to transition the pronunciation of the phrase "of the" in the phrase "to be in the belly of the beast". You'll notice there I just did it. "To be in the belly of the beast" is how we would sort of say this if we separate the words out. But if we join it all together, you'll hear that "of the" becomes "eh-the, eh-the", right. Two schwa sounds and there's "th" between them, right or TH sound between them.

"Eh-the, Eh-the". "To be in the belly of the beast". "Eh-the beast, Eh-the beast". Right. "To be in the belly of the beast." That is just reductions. Right. We do that with words like "of and the and to and a" all the time, it's related to intonation and speaking quickly, and this is what we do in English all the time, so pay attention to these sorts of things if you really want to nail your pronunciation in English.

So, before we finish up, guys, I thought I would go through some wild facts about Australia. So, Australia is a huge island, right. A continent with an extensive coastline that has a wide range of aquatic environments, from cold southern oceans to warm tropical ones. As a result, 45 species of cetaceans, which include whales, dolphins and porpoises, call the waters surrounding Australia home.

30 whales, including baleen whales and toothed whales, 14 dolphins and one porpoise. Baleen whales are large whales that have baleen, these are plates of whale bone, kind of like large, bristly, thick hair inside their mouths that they use to strain plankton or fish out of the water. So, they're filter feeders, they're sifting through the water that they gulp up into their mouths in order to filter out the food.

We've got toothed whales and these are cetaceans that have teeth, but not baleen, things like killer whales, although I think a killer whale is technically a dolphin. What's another example? A minke whale, I think has teeth, right? A minke whale. We've got dolphins, these are small toothed whales, I guess it's used interchangeably here, toothed whale and dolphin. Dolphins are just small, right. It's kind of like rats and mice.

So, dolphins are small toothed whales with beak like snouts, these long protruded snouts, cone shaped teeth and curved fins on their backs. And they're very social and highly intelligent. And then we have porpoises, which are another type of small toothed whale, really small, even smaller than dolphins, but unlike dolphins, they have spade shaped teeth and a stubbier snout, it's not as long.

The largest whale in Australian waters is the blue whale, which is found along the southern coasts and the western coasts of Australia. And the only porpoise found around Australia is the spectacled porpoise, named so because it has these white rings around its eyes. We also have things like bottlenose dolphins and killer whales that you will see all along the coast around Australia.

And then especially where I live, you'll often see in the wintertime the migration of humpback whales and southern right whales up the coast, going to Queensland where they can breed in warmer waters. So, if you get the chance to go, guys, I really recommend going whale watching anywhere in Australia, but if you go in Victoria, keep an eye out for the white whale Migaloo, who's become a bit of a rock star.

He is bright white, he's an albino and he is a humpback whale that is- He's absolutely massive and spectacular looking, I definitely recommend that you look up some photos of Migaloo. Anyway, guys, that is it for today. My voice is starting to fail. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. I hope you've learnt a lot.

You are here in the belly of the beast of Aussie English learning Australian English with me, Pete. Thanks for joining me and I'll see you next time. Bye.