Transcript of AE 1243 - Expression: Take the Cake

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 guys, I hope you are having an amazing week. It's a bit of a wet one here at the moment, although I think it's meant to heat up as of tomorrow, I think it's going to be closer to 30 degrees and then we'll probably have a warm few days. But over this weekend it has been quite cold. Rainy, drizzly, overcast. Cloudy. I'm sure if you're down here in the south east of Australia, you know what it's like. And I guess at the moment we have Cyclone Jasper up in the north of Australia, about to hit the coast near Mackay, I believe. So if any of you guys are around that area, I hope that you stay safe and sound right, that you buckle down, that you fasten the hatch, keep everything locked down, and, uh, stay safe with all those crazy winds and everything going on there.

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All right. Let's get into today's Q&A question and answer. And it comes from Joanne. So I believe that is a Portuguese name. So he'll be either from Portugal or Brazil I assume. So he asks "What is your favourite Aussie food now?" I had to think for a little while, because there's quite a lot of different Australian foods that I'm fond of that I like, right? Things like fish and chips. It's so hard though, because there are so many Australian foods, but they're not unique to Australia. So this is one of those things where when you ask that question, it's kind of like, do you mean a food that is found in Australia that's very common and a lot of people eat, which could be found elsewhere in the world as well.

Right. Like fish and chips. People eat that all over the place, you know, came from Britain. But we have our own sort of unique way of doing it. Or do you mean a food that is uniquely found in Australia that is only found here? So if it is the latter of those two things and it's something that is uniquely Australian, I would probably say a lamington.

A lamington. I wonder if you know what a lamington is. This is a square of sponge cake dipped in melted chocolate and then covered in grated coconut. And it's just amazing if you do it right. If you buy one that someone has cooked correctly, they've cooked it well. They have prepared it really well. It is just the bee's knees. It is absolutely phenomenal. So tasty, so nice, really moist, spongy and sweet. So yeah, lamingtons. And you'll often see different flavoured ones. I think pink lamingtons are all over the place now, and I would imagine those are not chocolate, but instead some other kind of flavouring, I don't know, pink flavouring. What would that be? What kind of fruit? Maybe strawberry? Not sure, but yeah. Lamingtons. I reckon they're pretty pretty tasty. All right, so let's get into today's joke. Slap that bird. All right. So here we go.

Hopefully you see the connection between lamingtons and cakes and uh, the expression today and uh, today's joke. Okay, so here you go. Are you ready for this? Are you ready?

"Why couldn't the teddy bear finish his cake?" Um, so a teddy bear. This is like a stuffed toy for kids, right, a teddy bear. "Why couldn't the teddy bear finish his cake?" "Because he was stuffed!"

You get it? Do you get it? "He was stuffed." So 'stuffed' can mean quite a few different things, right? That's the word. That's the pun that's been used here in this joke. We can use 'stuffed' as slang for incredibly full. So that's the joke. But we can also use it for, say, a toy, a 'stuffed' toy to be full of fabric. So teddy bear is often stuffed with fluff with cotton with, I don't know, maybe feathers? You know, all sorts of stuff to make sure that it is nice and fluffy and kind of, you know, chubby little teddy bear. So 'stuffed' can be when you've stuffed a lot of something inside of something, you know, you can stuff heaps of stuffing inside of a stuffed teddy bear. And if you eat a lot of food, you can be stuffed as well. And I guess the idea, the parallel there is like you've 'stuffed' all that food into yourself, so you filled yourself up like the teddy bear is full of stuffing, you're full of food and you are stuffed.

But we can also use 'stuffed' in English, in Australian English in particular, to mean tired or exhausted. "Oh mate, I went to the gym today and I am so stuffed. I'm so buggered. I'm so wrecked. I am so tired. I'm absolutely stuffed." Anyway, that was the joke. "Why couldn't the teddy bear finish his cake?" "Because he was stuffed." Ugh. Good jokes. All right, let's get into today's expression.

Today's expression is 'to take the cake'. 'To take the cake'? I wonder if you guys have ever taken the cake. Where did you take it? If you took the cake somewhere, where did you take it? So before we go through that expression, what it means and how to use it, let's go through the words in the expression.

'To take'. 'To take something'. If you 'take something', generally this is to accept or receive someone or something, right? "She was advised to take the job that was offered to her." "My mum made a cake and I took it to work, and I gave that cake to all my friends and they took it back to their desk where they could eat it." 'To take'.

'The' or 'the'. This is the definitive article or definite article. I think it's definite article. So the specific thing being mentioned. "This is 'the' house where I live." "Is this 'the' dog that you own?" It's not just any dog. It's not just a dog. It is the dog that you own. This is your dog. This is the dog that you own.

And then lastly, 'a cake'. A 'cake' is an item of soft, sweet food made from a mixture of flour, fat, eggs, sugar, and other ingredients, baked and sometimes iced or decorated. "My mum made me a delicious 'cake' for my birthday and it was smothered in whipped cream." Oh yummy yummy.

All right, so if you 'take the cake', if something 'takes the cake', this is one of those weird expressions where it seems to have no real connection to the words in the expression. So if something 'takes the cake', it is the most remarkable or foolish thing of its kind, right? It is something that is especially annoying or surprising, or it can be the prime example of a type, quality, etc., usually used ironically to convey mild disapproval.

So it's quite a few sort of definitions I've tried to give you there to help you understand to take the cake, but the reason I wanted to do this one is that I saw it. I noticed it being used in a bit. So a section from a comedians what would you say show a bit by my favourite comedian, George Carlin. He is a pisser. Really funny. He's an American comedian who's known for his focus on words and the English language. So he often does jokes about English being clever with the words or expressions. And in the clip that I was watching, he mentions all of these, quote unquote, sort of stupid, uh, English expressions that don't seem to make sense. And he talks about 'taking the cake'. Let me play the clip for you now.

He takes the cake, boy, he really takes the cake. Where? Where do you take a cake? To the movies? You know where I would take a cake? Down to the bakery to see the other cakes. And how come he takes the cake? How come you don't take the pie? Pie is easier to carry than a cake. Easy as pie. Cake is not too hard to carry either. Piece of cake.

All right, so hopefully you enjoyed that, guys. So I looked up the origin of this expression. And Vocabulary.com says "Originally, 'to take the cake' meant to win a prize or a competition. People as far back as the ancient Greeks used the word cake to mean a symbolic prize. Over time, it grew to have a more negative, sarcastic meaning in English: 'I can't believe this mess'", right? That's the kind of idea. 'I can't believe this mess. Oh man, this takes the cake.'

So let's go through three examples of how to use the expression to take the cake. Example number one. Imagine you've got a child who's at primary school and they're starting to act up a little bit, right? They're misbehaving in class. The teacher's constantly calling you up on the phone at the end of every day saying, you know, your daughter, your son has been messing up in class.

They've gotten into all this mischief. They've been naughty. Uh, maybe they've been making and throwing paper planes constantly, or yelling and shouting at other kids and just constantly making noise. Usually it's relatively harmful or harmless, rather harmless stuff like that. But perhaps one day they do something a little more harmful, right? So this time they've fashioned a knife out of a pen and are pretending to stab people. You know, maybe, maybe it's something crazy like that.

And the teacher rings you up and he's like, your kid has done something absolutely awful. We can't be okay with this. We have to deal with this. And when you find out about it, you might say to your kid mate, look, normally you're a little bit naughty, but this today, what you've done making this knife out of a pen, that really 'takes the cake', right? This is particularly bad. Surprising, silly, annoying, embarrassing. This is an incredibly remarkable or foolish thing. This really takes the cake. Making a knife out of a pen? Mate, 'that takes the cake'. What are you doing? What are you doing? It really 'takes the cake'.

All right, example number two. Maybe you're a bit of a fantasy fan who loves TV shows like Game of Thrones. This was me back in the day, right? I remember being into it for years. That was until season seven and eight came around. So if you've seen the show, which I assume most of you guys have, you'll remember that the writers were kind of in a hurry towards the end of the series to get it done so that they could move on to bigger and better things. Right? I think they had a deal going over to Star Wars and, uh, writing for that.

So season seven of Game of Thrones kind of sucked a little bit. It wasn't too bad, but it kind of sucked. And then season eight came around, and I remember watching the first episode or two and was like, mate, this is screwed. This is 'stuffed'. This is absolutely a bad sign. This 'takes the cake'. It's going to be so much worse than I was expecting. This season is so poor, so awful, so surprisingly bad. It really 'takes the cake'. Season eight 'took the cake'. It was just awful.

Example number three. So I bought a guitar amp a few months back from a shop in Melbourne, and I got the amp home. It was a valve amp for playing guitar, and I plugged it in and it started making all these weird noises, right? It was buzzing noises, clicking noises. Something was obviously wrong. You shouldn't have those noises coming out of an amp whilst you're trying to play guitar, unless you're specifically making the noises with the guitar itself. But even when I wasn't playing, the amp was obviously malfunctioning and making these weird noises, so I sent it back to be repaired.

It was going to take months, and instead they decided to replace it with a different amp, similar one. They sent that to me and that had loads of other issues. High pitched whistles were coming out constantly and it was effectively unusable. So I remember just sending it back and being like, mate, the first amp was bad, but this one really 'takes the cake'. This one is way worse than the initial one. It's making even weirder noises, more annoying, more annoying noises that are high pitched that I can't handle when I'm trying to play guitar. It 'takes the cake'. It's really bad. It's surprisingly awful. It is a prime example of poor quality. It 'takes the cake'.

So hopefully now guys, you understand the expression to take the cake. If something takes the cake, it is the most remarkable or foolish of its kind. It is really annoying or surprising or awful, or it is the prime example of something, and we usually use that to mean something poor, you know, bad quality, not not something good. You wouldn't be like this. This amazing thing 'takes the cake'. It's when the thing is negative.

All right, guys, so as usual, let's go through a little pronunciation exercise. And this is where you can work on your Australian accent and your English speech, your spoken English, your fluency, your connected speech, everything like that. So listen to the words and phrases here as I say them out loud. And then there's a little space after each word or phrase so that you can say it out loud wherever you are. Okay, you're ready to rock. Let's go.

To. To take. To take the. To take the cake. To take the cake. To take the cake. To take the cake. To take the cake. I reckon that takes the cake. You reckon that takes the cake? He reckons that takes the cake. She reckons that takes the cake. We reckon that takes the cake. They reckon that takes the cake. It reckons that takes the cake.

Great job guys. So what can we talk about here in terms of connected speech? 'I reckon that takes the cake' 'to take the cake'. I guess the, the stuff that we can notice here is that 'to' and 'the' or 'the', are the words that get reduced. And given that schwa vowel sound, we talk about this quite frequently. It is a common occurrence in spoken English, but it is a key thing to learn and understand and be able to use in order to sound much more natural when speaking English, being able to reduce certain words. So when these are used in phrases like 'to take the cake'. You'll notice /tu/ and /the/ /tu take the cake/, /tu take the cake/.

And the important words that are being emphasised are the action words. These verbs and nouns. Right. 'Take' and 'cake' /tu take the cake/. /I reckon that takes the cake/ /You reckon that takes the cake/ Right? So work on that sort of stuff. Try and pay attention to rhythm and how people pronounce those sorts of smaller words. The less important words in words, in phrases that get reduced. See if you can notice them when practising English words like two the of at all those sorts of things.

All right. The last little section here guys. This is a little listen and listening comprehension exercise where you're meant to listen to a clip and then write down what you hear being said. The clip in today's exercise comes from an Aussie series called Firebite. The excerpt is "When the vampire king arrives to the last colonial stronghold in a remote Australian mining town, it's up to two Aboriginal renegades, Tyson and Shanika, to stop and end the bloody 230 year war for land and power."

I looked this up. I think it's going to be a funny series. I haven't watched it yet, but I have got access to it, so I might watch it this week. And it seems to be one of these kind of like tongue in cheek, joking, funny comedic series. And I like it because it's taken a Western kind of European. What would you say myth, you know, vampires, Dracula, and mixed it with indigenous culture in Australia to mix the two of them. And Tyson and Shanika are these kind of like vampire hunters? So I think it's going to be pretty cool.

So the name of the game today, guys, I'm going to play a clip for you two times. You're going to try and listen and then write down what you hear being said. And if you want to check the answer, remember you can download today's free worksheet from the website. Just go and find this episode's number, look it up on the website and you'll see the answer at the bottom on the worksheet. You will also see a place where you can write, you know, straight lines, where you can write out what you think you hear being said, and then check it with the answer. And obviously, if you have the premium podcast membership, you will see the answer in the transcript as well. So you're ready to go. Here's the first playthrough.

You want to call it Australia Day? Well, we call it Invasion Day. My people lived happily; looked after the land. Tyson says there was just an occasional punch up. But it was all cool.

Great work. How'd you go? Did you get all of it? Time for the second playthrough.

You want to call it Australia Day? Well, we call it Invasion Day. My people lived happily; looked after the land. Tyson says there was just an occasional punch up. But it was all cool.

All right, that's it from me today. Guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I am Pete, your host. This is Aussie English and I hope you have an amazing weekend. See you next time!