Transcript of AE 1233 - Expression: Go For Broke

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 flippin' 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 guys! Welcome to this episode of Aussie English. My name is Pete. I'm your host and this is the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So guys, welcome! I hope you've been having an amazing week. It's been a bit of a dreary and not gloomy but a little overcast. It's been raining heaps over the last few days. This huge cold front came through and just brought a heap of rain. After we had a week where I think it was in the sort of high 20s in terms of temperature. So it had been kind of nice. You know, we're already at that stage where summer is upon us and when it's nice and warm at night, it's nice to kind of leave the doors open at the front and the back of the house and allow that air to come through. So we have one of those nights, and I was kind of like, Oh my God, this is what it's like. I've forgotten what summer's like. And then the rain returns.

So anyway, guys, welcome to this episode. Before we get into it, don't forget if you want the transcripts for each of these episodes, I think we've got over 1200 of them now. You know, 1200. Go and check out the Premium podcast membership. Just go to AussieEnglish.com.au/podcast and you can sign up for it there. It's less than $1 a day. You'll get access to all the transcripts for the episodes, bonus episodes, you'll get the premium podcast player so that you can read and listen online. That's the best way to level up your listening comprehension skills and vocab. And you also obviously get the PDFs that you can print out, study them, highlight them, take notes, all that sort of stuff. All right, so let's get into today's episode.

Let's get into the Q and A, and this one comes from Molaei, I believe, or Molaei, "Are there any social events or gatherings where we can freely practice English speaking?" So I'm guessing you mean in person as opposed to online, and not necessarily related to Aussie English, you know, and the podcast and everything? Yeah. So there are lots of language meetups and these tend to be free and they occur in larger cities generally, you know, you should be able to find these online. I remember finding them I think on meetup.com as well as on Facebook. There's Facebook groups for this sort of thing, one that I used to go to all the time in Melbourne when I lived in the city there was called Mundo Lingo, and there's another one called Lingos I think as well.

But these are effectively events where I think once a week on a Wednesday or a Thursday, you can go to wherever the location is. It's usually a restaurant or a pub or something, and you put the stickers on your chest of the languages you speak, usually your native language, I think at the top, and then the other ones below that. And every time I went there were hundreds of people there learning all kinds of languages, but typically everyone spoke English. Everyone either spoke it as a native language or was learning English as a foreign language. Right, because we're in Australia, go figure.

So they're a great place to work on your English skills, but better than that, you get to meet people and you can create friendships. You can obviously organise your own little groups with those people. You can catch up outside of the meetups, elsewhere in the city. You can, yeah, they were just great because they would go for hours. You could do it, you know, you could go to these events and spend 3 to 4 hours speaking English, you know, I think they would start at like 6 p.m. and go until 10 or 11:00 at night. So, you know, if you get one of these events in once a week, that is a hell of a lot of practice. If you are speaking English.

The best part about them, from my point of view, is the fact that you get to meet other people, right? It's not just online, it's in person. You can develop friendships, maybe even relationships, who knows? And, you know, have a social network of other language learners that you can hang out with. And if you find out, you know, if you do a bit of a search and you find that there aren't any of these groups near you, maybe try and start one, you know, create a Facebook group, post an ad on meetup.com or whatever it is, you know, get the word out there and try and start your own little free language meetup where on a regular basis you guys catch up at a certain location and you work on your languages, whether it's English or any other language. But that's what I'd suggest. There's definitely loads of them out there, though. I think when I was living in Melbourne there was at least three that would take place, often on different days, so you could be a total animal and go to all of them. You know, it'd probably be like ten hours of practice a week. So yeah. All right, slap the bird, give it a punch, and let's get into today's joke!

So today's joke is "My friend made it his life's mission to fight poverty. He wrestles homeless people every weekend!" Do you get it? It's kind of. It's kind of a bit dark, right? It's a bit of black humour. Um, so 'My friend made it his life's mission to fight poverty.' We always use this, you know, to, 'To fight against something.' Often when it's not a person or a team or a- Yeah, I don't know. I guess when you're trying to, to compete against. What do I want to say, when you're taking on something like poverty or mental health issues or illness or, you know, we use the verb 'to fight' and it's a bit strange, right? You're kind of like, 'Yeah, we are fighting it', but it's not in the physical sense that you're getting this thing and punching it on the ground, right?

But that's where the joke turns. The follow up is 'He wrestles homeless people every weekend.' Right? Because homeless people obviously suffer from poverty. They are experiencing significant poverty. And so the joke here is on the word 'to fight'. If you 'fight' someone, this is to take part in a violent struggle with that person, you know, physically kicking them, using weapons. "Two men are fighting in the street." But you can also struggle to overcome something, eliminate something or prevent something by 'fighting' it. You know, you might fight racism. You might fight poverty or illness, as we've already mentioned.

So hopefully, hopefully, you like that joke. All right. So today's expression 'to go for broke', 'to go for broke'. See how those are connected. Poverty. If you are 'experiencing poverty', you are 'broke'. You don't have money. So 'to go for broke', let's go through the different words in this expression.

To go. This has many meanings, often to move in a specific direction. Right? Go forwards, go backwards. Here, it's a phrasal verb with the particle. Particle? Yeah. No. Preposition. Geez. With the preposition 'for'. And 'for' here is used as a function word to indicate an intended goal. Right?

So if you 'go for something', it's like you are trying to get that thing. So 'The pickpocket went for my wallet', right? 'The thief went for my bag.' It's what they were trying to obtain. That was their goal, to get that thing. To go for something, to attempt to gain or attain or obtain that thing. 'He went for a job at Bunnings yesterday. Did he get it?' 'I don't know, but he definitely went for that job.'.

Broke. If you're broke, whether it's a person, a company, a business, you are bankrupt. You have no money, you are 'broke' man. 'I'm so broke at the moment I have no money.'.

So we use the expression 'to go for broke', meaning in the figurative sense that you take the most extreme or risky course of action possible in order to try and achieve success.

You are going for broke. It's like- I guess you're sort of betting everything on something, right? That would be the literal version of it, to wager everything.

And I looked up the origin of this expression, and this was an interesting one. So apparently it is from Hawaiian pigeon craps slang. And when I say craps, craps is actually a gambling game. You can play craps at the casino. Right? So it meant 'to go for broke.' It meant to wager everything on one roll, I assume, of the dice. So you would be broke. If you lost, you would become bankrupt. Right?

So it was popularised in the film Go for Broke from 1951, which is named for the 442nd Infantry Regiment's unit motto 'to go for broke'. And it originates from that idea of gambling and risking everything in order to hopefully win a lot. But yeah, I think there's probably more losers than winners when it comes to gambling. The house always wins. All right.

So let's go through three examples of how I would use the expression 'to go for broke'. Example number one, imagine you are a bike racer and you love the dangerous sport of mountain bike riding, right? It's fast paced. It's risky. You love travelling quickly at high speeds, down mountains, in forests amongst the trees, maybe too close to cliffs, edges for the average person to be able to handle.

When racing against other competitors, you often have to go all out. You have to give it your all. You have to go for broke. You have to risk everything to try and win the race. But sometimes it can end in catastrophe. If you crash your bike, hit a tree, if you go over a cliff's edge, hopefully you survive. But you got to risk it all. You go for broke to go for broke.

Example number two, imagine you're a gambler who loves going to Crown Casino in Melbourne. Maybe you're a massive fan of poker or blackjack or playing craps, and you love betting loads of money on these games. One day you're in a huge game where there's millions of dollars at stake, right? There's millions of dollars that are being bet on on the table. On a certain hand, if you're playing poker or blackjack and you're hoping to win everything, so you push in all of your money, right? You chuck, in everything you give, everything you give it your all, you go for broke. You're hoping to win big. You're hoping to go home with the lot. Who knows? You wager everything. You go for broke.

Example number three. A great example would be those James Bond movies where James Bond is usually in the heart of the enemy base trying to stop the end of the world, you know, prevent the nuke from being launched, or the mutant shark man from escaping and killing everyone.

And he often finds himself only just escaping by the skin of his teeth. Right? He runs away. He gets out of an exploding volcano or a burning building or something just at the last second. So at those moments, he gives it his all. He goes all in, he goes for broke. And yeah, he usually comes away with a win. Right?

So there you go. That's the expression 'to go for broke'. If you 'go for broke', you take the most extreme or risky of the possible courses of action in order to try and win, to try and achieve something. And the literal sense would be to wager everything. Right? All of your money on, say, a single crapshoot. And I guess that's where we get the we have a lot of these gambling kind of expressions. You know, if we say something is 'a bit of a crapshoot' that is talking about craps and throwing the dice down, I guess that's the shoot, right? Throwing the dice down. You may win, you may lose. It's 'a crapshoot'. So you may be successful. You may not.

So anyway, guys, let's get into the pronunciation exercise as always here. This is a good chance for you to work on your Australian English pronunciation, but if you're working on a different accent, just say these words and phrases out loud after me without necessarily trying to copy my pronunciation perfectly.

Okay, so find somewhere away from people. Hopefully if you're out and about walking, you know, you just look like you're on the phone repeating the same expression over and over and over again. But yeah, listen and repeat after me.

To. To go. To go for. To go for broke. To go for broke. To go for broke. To go for broke. To go for broke. To go for broke. I went for broke. You went for broke. He went for broke. She went for broke. We went for broke. They went for broke. It went for broke. Good job, guys. Good job.

So there's some interesting stuff going on here. When I say 'to go for broke', 'to go for broke', which words do you hear being reduced? 'To' and 'for', right. 'Tə go for broke'. And this is a good exercise to work on that Australian O sound as well. That diphthong that gives so many of you a bit of a headache /o/ /o/ to /go/ for broke, to /go/ for broke, to /go/ for broke.

So to and for get reduced. And given that schwa vowel sound to and for and you'll notice that the R at the end of the word for isn't pronounced for because there's a B, a consonant sound that comes after it at the start of the word 'broke'- fər broke, tə go fər broke, tə go for broke.

Now the last thing to mention here is there's something interesting happening at the end of the word 'went', right. If I say it clearly here 'went', what do you hear me saying? At the end of the word 'went', I'm saying the T /wenT/ /wenT/.

But when it's within a sentence like this and there's a consonant that comes after the word 'went', you'll hear the T gets muted because we've got a bit of a consonant cluster now, don't we. So we've got /I went for broke/, we have /nt/ at the end of the word 'went' and we have the F at the start of the word 'for'. So what happens to the T, we mute it in our mouths. We don't release it. I wen[t] for broke. I wen[t] for broke. So we don't necessarily say /I wenT for broke/. Too much effort.

Most English speakers of any dialect won't do that. I wenT for broke. They won't say that. They'll say I wen[t] for broke. I wen[t] for broke. I wen[t] for broke. And all I'm doing there is pushing my tongue against the top of my mouth as if I was about to say the T sound, but I just don't release it. Wen[t], wen[t], wen[t], wen[t]. I wen[t] for broke. I wen[t] for broke. I wen[t] for broke.

Good job, guys! Don't forget, if you want to learn more about these aspects of pronunciation, Australian pronunciation in particular, check out my Australian pronunciation course at AussieEnglish.com.au/apc.

There's three different sections to this course. The first part teaches you how to use the international phonetic alphabet so that you can maximise your progress when working on your accent, your Australian pronunciation, but you can use it to work on any other accent as well. The second part goes through the different vowel sounds and different consonant sounds. In Australian English there's about 42 of them with exercises, listen and repeat exercises, tongue twisters, tutorial videos on the pronunciation so that you can see my mouth, how it's moving, everything like that. And then the third section goes over the more advanced aspects of spoken English and pronunciation, like the muted T there. In that example, I wen[t] for broke and the missing R in the word 'for'. And we also talk about that, why don't we say that R there.

So anyway, let's get into the last section of today's episode. This is where I'm going to play a clip from an Aussie film. Today's Aussie film is called Top End Wedding from 2019. The excerpt is "Lauren and Ned have ten Days to find Lauren's mother, who has gone AWOL"- so that the idea of AWOL is 'missing'- "in the remote far north of Australia so that they can reunite her parents and pull off their dream wedding." So it's got a lot of really cool humour in it. I like this film quite a bit. It's also full of Indigenous culture and everything up there too, so definitely check it out. Top End Wedding from 2019.

So the aim of the game here, guys, I'm going to play the clip for you two times. Your goal is to write down what you think you hear being said. If you need to listen multiple times, just rewind the episode on whatever platform you're using and obviously re listen. Remember, you can check your answer by downloading today's free PDF worksheet where you'll have space to write down what you think you hear being said and the answers also at the bottom of the worksheet.

But also if you are a premium podcast member, you will see the answer in the transcript as well. So are you ready to go? Here's the first playthrough.

Tiwi taxi service! Where are you going, sis? I was just driving past. Well, you got a lift or what? No, nothing. Well, jump in. Look, I don't bite. Not unless you want me to.

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

Tiwi taxi service! Where are you going, sis? I'm just driving past. Well, you got a lift or what? No, nothing. Well, jump in. Look, I don't bite. Not unless you want me to.

All right. Good job, guys. That's it from me. I hope you enjoyed today's episode, and I will see you next time. Catch ya!