Transcript of AE 1254 - Expression: Mince Your Words

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. The lingo of those Down Under right from Australia. So I hope you guys are having an absolute ripper of a week. If you are down in the South east at the moment, you are probably suffering through a bit of heat, at least at the time of this recording coming out. For the last few days it's been above 30 degrees, which, it's been an interesting kind of summer. Right? This is despite, you know, global warming and climate change taking place and heating the world up.

Obviously, this summer has been a little more temperate, a little cooler than usual, and I don't even think we've had a day above 40 degrees, down in Victoria, here. At least where I live, there's probably been 1 or 2 around Australia, but, yeah, that's uncommon. It's unheard of usually down here in south east Australia. Usually we get a few days at least of above 40, and thankfully I haven't heard of any serious bushfires taking place this year. Again, knock on wood, hopefully that remains to be the case for the rest of this summer. But yeah, I hope you guys are doing well. I hope you're enjoying the the warmth. If you are currently down here near where I live in, Victoria. But yeah, welcome to this podcast guys.

Today we're going to be doing the expression to mince your words, to mince your words. Before we get into that, let me do a little shameless plug for the podcast. You know, this is the way for you guys to support the podcast and keep me doing what I'm doing. If you would like to get all the transcripts for the transcribed episodes on the podcast, which is the vast majority of them, be sure to sign up for the premium podcast membership at AussieEnglish.Com.au/podcast.

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All right. So guys let's get into the Q&A for today. The question and answer this one comes from Eddie. And Eddie asks, "Do Aussies say goodnight or goodbye when saying goodbye at night?" All right, so that might sound a little confusing. We can use both. We can use both.

But typically I would say have a good night. And then I would probably just stick to goodbye or see you later, you know, some sort of variant there. Good night. You know you can use but quite often for me at least, I would use this when wishing someone like a one of my kids, hoping they have a good sleep. Right?

So when you put them to bed, you can say to them, good night. Usually it's related to going to sleep, to going to bed. So like if I was hanging out with my parents at their house and my dad was like, I've got a bit of a headache, I'm going to go to sleep early tonight, you know, sorry, it's only 5:00, but I'm going to go to bed. I might be like, all right, good night, dad, you know, love you. See you in the morning. Good night. So I usually use that for wishing someone, you know, sleeps well. 'Good night mate.'

'Good evening.' That's one that we would use for not ever saying goodbye to someone again. You would say something like, 'Oh, okay, have a good evening.' You know, 'Enjoy your evening'. 'Have a good evening.' If you say good evening, it's kind of a greeting. Right. So if you see someone at night time, you can say, 'Oh good evening. How are you going?' You know, as in, yeah. G'day. You can say that as well, but 'good evening'.

So yeah, hopefully that answers your question. Typically I would use goodbye for saying goodbye to someone. Otherwise expressions like 'catch you later', 'see you later'. 'Enjoy your night'. 'Enjoy your day'. Everything like that. 'Good night', I use more often for saying to someone when they're about to go to bed, about to go to sleep and obviously at night time. If you did that in the morning, saying good night to someone would be a bit strange.

Anyway, slap the bird, give it a kick, and let's get into today's joke. Okay, so I tried to connect the joke to mince as in minced beef, right? Beef that has been ground up and minced. Okay. So see if you can see the connection. Here's a joke. Are you ready? "What do you call a cow with no legs?" Right. So what do you call a cow? Moo. One of those animals, a livestock, right? You get milk from them and and meat.

"What do you call a cow with no legs?" "Ground beef." "Ground beef." That's. Oh, my God, these are so dumb.

Okay. So, 'ground'. This is the past participle of 'to grind something', which means to produce something to small particles or powder. Right. So, like, if you got a rock and you smashed it into tiny little pieces, you can grind it up, right? Grinding is kind of like really crunching into the thing to try and turn it into very small pieces and parts. Right.

You might grind, what is it? Wheat? To turn it into flour, to grind that thing. You can grind up beef to make mince, right? You put bits of beef meat into a mincer, into a machine that chops it all up really, really finely and turns it into mince, right, to ground beef.

But obviously the ground is the solid surface of the earth, right? It's the floor beneath your feet. It's the, yeah. It's the, it's the ground. Good explanation, Pete. So I'm standing on the ground, right. You tripped over a rock and you fell on the ground.

So the joke here, what do you call a cow with no legs? Ground beef. Right. Because the cow is beef. That's where we get beef meat from. And it's on the ground because it's got no legs, right? Just rolling around on the ground. So it's ground beef. Oh, man. The older you get, the the dumb. The joke makes you laugh more, more, more.

All right, so let's get into today's expression, guys, 'to mince your words'. All right. First we'll go through the words. We'll go through the origin. Some examples the pronunciation exercise. And then at the end we'll finish up with a little listening comprehension exercise okay.

So, 'to mince something'. We kind of just covered that right. To grind something up to mince something is to cut up or grind, especially food usually meat, into very small pieces, typically in a machine with blades that revolve, that move around. Right. So you mince beef, you mince meat. "He mince the beef by grinding it up."

But we can also use 'mince' to mean 'to soften' or 'moderate', especially for the sake of conventional politeness. So this is where it's connecting to words. And we'll typically only use 'mince' in this way with this expression, 'to mince your words'. Okay.

So I'm not going 'to mince my words'. I'm going to tell you straight and we'll get into the meaning and how to use it a little more lately. But yeah, if you're mincing what you're saying effectively, you're softening it, you're moderating it, you're making sure it's not too offensive.

'Your'. Second person possessive pronoun, you know this one. 'It's your turn'. 'Here's your change'. Your.

And 'words'. I'm going to assume you know what a 'word' is. A word is a single, distinct, meaningful element of speech or writing used with others or sometimes alone to form a sentence, and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed.

I love such a simple thing has such a complicated and, verbose, explanation, definition, right? So, "The page has words all over it." There you go, a 'word'. But yes, to mince your words.

If you 'mince your words', it is to obfuscate. That's a very cool word, meaning to speak vaguely, to speak in an indirect way, so to not be clear and concise and obvious with what you mean. Right? So you mince your words. And I guess the idea is that you're kind of mixing up and changing your words to avoid being direct, to be a little more vague than usual, to obfuscate what you are saying.

So, we often use this in the negative though, right? We often say it as to not mince your words so, you know, speak plainly, don't mince your words. Or this guy, he's always really direct. He never minces his words. I don't want to mince my words.

So where does this come from? The phrases roots trace back to the verb 'mince', initially meaning to cut into small pieces, as we've sort of covered today. And when applied to speech, 'mincing your words' describes the act of speaking cautiously or politely, typically involving the use of euphemisms or indirect language. Right. So you sort of pad out your language in order to avoid being direct about something. You mince your words, you mix them all together, you know, you mix in other words to kind of obfuscate and make less clear what it is that you're trying to really say.

So let's go through some examples of how to use the expression to mince your words. So example number one. Imagine you're in a job interview. You're trying to land your dream job. You saw it advertised online. You've seen in your resume, your CV, your curriculum vitae, CV, and now find yourself face to face with the interviewers and they sit you down for the job interview despite having loads of confidence and thinking, you know, you're going to nail this job interview. You're going to crush it. You're going to do so well.

At the end of it, the interviewers don't mince their words and they tell you directly, "Look, unfortunately, you don't have enough experience for the job. Sorry." You're not a good fit. You're not going to get the job. We can't hire you. Sorry. We're not going to mince our words. We're going to talk to you directly. We're going to be straightforward. We're going to be open and honest. We're not going to mince our words. Good luck finding a job elsewhere.

Example number two. Imagine you're in a relationship with someone. You and your partner might be at odds over something that happened recently. So to be at odds, you might be fighting about that thing. You may be disagreeing about that thing. Maybe you had a fight because one of you didn't pay for a dinner bill, or maybe you said something that hurt the feelings of the other person and they overreacted.

If you're very open, honest, and direct with your partner and you tell them, you know, I don't think you're treating me right. Or I don't think that it was fair that you didn't pay for dinner, or that you said this or that. You're not mincing your words, right? You're not obfuscating. You're not being indirect. You're being very open, clear and obvious with what it is that you mean. You're getting directly to the point. 'This is my issue and I want to resolve it with you', right? So there's no point in mincing my words. I want to fix the situation and move on. I'm not going to mince my words. I'm going to speak plainly.

Example number three. Okay, so imagine you've written a professional email to someone, perhaps your manager at work, you know, stepped on your toes whilst you were trying to complete a task and you've decided to send them an email and be like, 'Oi, you know, this happened. I feel like you stepped on my toes', you know, figuratively. Hopefully not literally, where they've actually trodden on your toes. To step on someone's toes is to kind of like, go too far, get in the way, do what they shouldn't do, right?

So you're being honest and straightforward with this person when you say to them, you know, I'm a bit upset about this. I feel like you've undermined my job. What I was trying to do at work, you stood on my toes in front of everyone and kind of embarrassed me.

If you do this, you're not mincing your words, so you can't mince your words. In a situation like that, it's important to be open and honest about your feelings about the transgression that you feel has has occurred. You know, the issue at hand, the problem that has happened. There's no point mincing your words if you want to resolve that issue.

So hopefully now, guys, you understand the expression to mince your words. If you mince your words when speaking, you are obfuscating. You are speaking vaguely. You are being indirect about what it is that you mean, what it is that you're trying to say. You are mincing your words.

So as usual, guys, let's go through a little pronunciation exercise. This is where I'm going to say a number of words in sentences and then phrases for you to work on your Australian pronunciation as a quick plug. Remember, you can sign up for my Australian pronunciation course using the link AussieEnglish.Com.au/APC100.

When you use that link, you'll save $100 upon sign up and inside the course you will learn how to use the International Phonetic Alphabet, those weird little symbols that represent different sounds in Australian English that really helps you improve your pronunciation. When you understand that alphabet and how it's used, it helps you quickly improve. It helps you really, really quickly improve.

Beyond that, in section two of the course you will learn all the different sounds in Australian English the vowels, the consonants, how to say them and you'll have exercises to help you master all of the difficult ones.

And then in section three, we have all the advanced stuff. All the linking speech, all the sound changes, consonant clusters, everything like that. So go check it out and remember you'll save a hundred bucks if you use the link AussieEnglish.Com.au/APC100.

Okay, so are you ready? Listen and repeat after me. To. To mince. To mince your. To mince your words. To mince your words. To mince your words. To mince your words. To mince your words. I don't mince my words. You don't mince your words. He doesn't mince his words. She doesn't mince her words. We don't mince our words. They don't mince their words. It doesn't mince its words.

Great work guys. Okay, so let's break down a little bit what's happening here in terms of say rhythm and intonation. So with the phrase 'to mince your words', which words do you hear being reduced to mince your words and which words do you hear being emphasised. So 'to' and 'your' both get reduced and you'll hear the schwa sound, the schwa vowel sound instead of the vowel sound /oo/ in the word 'to' and /or/ in the word 'your'. So you're going to hear /tuh/ and /yuh/. /tuh mince yuh words/ /tuh mince yuh words/ /tuh mince yuh words/.

And so this often happens with verbs and nouns in phrases. They're the words that get emphasised and don't get reduced. So 'mince' and 'words', they're the important words in this phrase 'to mince your words'.

Now lastly, let's go over what's going on with the auxiliary verbs that have been negated. 'Don't' and 'doesn't'. What do you notice happening with the T sound at the end of the words 'don't' and 'doesn't', right, when we use them in a phrase?

Okay, so have a listen again. "I don't mince my words." "You don't mince your words." "He doesn't mince his words." "She doesn't mince her words." So we're muting the T. The T isn't being released. You're not getting that /t/ sound. And that's because there's a consonant that comes after the T at the start of the word 'mince'. We have an /mm/ consonant and an M sound. Right?

/don't mince/, /don't mince/, /doesn't mince/, /doesn't mince/. So you kind of /n/ on the N sound and you abruptly stop it. /don't/ /doesn't/ Instead of /donT/ /doesnT/. We would never say it like that. It's got to be this abrupt stop. And that shows us that there should be a T there. 'Don't'. 'Doesn't'. Okay, "I don't mince my words." "He doesn't mince his words."

All right good job guys. Now for the final section here. Today's clip comes from the Australian movie The Royal Hotel, which was released in 2023. So it is a relatively recent movie. "Americans Hannah and Liv are backpacking in Australia and take a temporary live in job in a remote outback mining town. Soon, they find themselves trapped in an unnerving situation that grows rapidly out of their control."

So hopefully if you check this movie out, you will enjoy it. The name of the game. Today I'm going to play a clip from this film for you two times, and your goal is to try and write down what you hear being said. And remember, you can check your answer either via the free PDF that you can download for this lesson on the website.

So just go to the Aussie English website, look for this episode of the podcast, and there'll be a free PDF download for you to study today's Expression episode and see the answer to this little exercise here. Or if you have the premium podcast membership, you will obviously see the answer in the transcript as well. Okay, so are you ready to go? Here's the first playthrough.

Physically, it's not a very demanding job. The only thing that can be a little bothersome is the remoteness of the location. Will there be kangaroos?

Awesome job guys! How'd you go? Did you get all of it? Time for the second playthrough.

Physically, it's not a very demanding job. The only thing that can be a little bothersome is the remoteness of the location. Will there be kangaroos?

All right, well, that's it for me today, guys. I hope you have a ripper of a day and I will see you next time.