Transcript of AE 1225 - Expression: Shoot from the hip

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!

All righty, guys. Welcome to this episode of Aussie English. I am your host, Pete, and this is the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Aussie English, Australian English. This is your one stop shop for everything Down Under. So guys, welcome. I hope you guys have been having a really good week. I have been hanging out with the kids a little bit. Joey had a day off yesterday where she was at home, so it was Pete and Joey's big day off. So yeah, we pretty much just hit up all of the kids parks around, then picked up Noah and went to another park, got some doughnuts and just, yeah. Unleashed, unleashed in the sun, sort of trying to enjoy the last of, of winter. It seems like the birds already nearby, some of them already have chicks. I'm actually kind of surprised. Right. I think we're still in winter, aren't we? These birds are already building nests. I've seen magpies, I've seen crows. I've seen. What else have I seen? Seagulls are collecting stuff to make nests with.

So they seem to- I wonder where they go off. I wonder if it's a temperature related thing where they suddenly get an urge to build a nest to lay their eggs in. Or if it's a light-related thing, right, as the days start getting longer. But it's happening so early this year it seems. So anyway. Yeah. Gonna have to keep an eye out for the magpies. They're going to start swooping soon because yeah, they'll be protecting their young. Anyway, so that's what I've been up to this week. Chilling out, hanging out with the family, doing a bit of guitar, doing a bit of plant stuff. But yeah, hope you guys are living it up, having a good time.

Don't forget, before we get into this episode that if you want to get access to the premium podcast membership, you can sign up to that at AussieEnglish.com.au/podcast. You'll get access to obviously all the podcast episodes, Members Only episodes as well the bonus episodes. You'll get the transcripts for every episode that comes with a transcript. I think we're well over 1200 episodes that have transcripts now. It's something ridiculous like that, but they allow you to read and listen at the same time. You can obviously print them out. You can read them online via the website, you can download them as PDFs, you can do whatever you want with them. But they're a great way of really honing in your listening skills, especially if you check out the interview episodes and you use the transcripts for those and the episodes where there's multiple people speaking at all at the same time.

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So this was an interesting question because I hadn't really thought about this too much. But it's actually the inverse of what you are asking when you say, 'Can we use it on young boys?' We actually use the word bloke, which just means, you know, a man. It's a slang term, an Australian informal slang term for man. We use it on anyone who has gone through puberty. So when I was thinking about this, I'm like, I would use bloke on a teenager that looks like an adult, right? They've, they've gone through puberty and they're sort of large like a man, but they could still be, you know, a child, effectively. Young teen, all the way up to an old man. You can say, you know this bloke? That's a bloke. I know that bloke, bloke.

Now, we don't typically use this on kid kids, right? So children, small children. The average person is not going to come across my son Noah and call him a bloke. Right? So if you saw Noah walking in the street with his parents, no one's going to shout out, Check out that bloke and be talking about Noah because he's a small child. If you saw a child and you said, Look at that bloke, I think people listening to you would be a bit confused. They'd be like, There's only a kid over there. There's no adult, there's no man, There's just a kid. Are you talking about the kid or are you talking about someone? Can I not see something? Is there an invisible friend over there? Who are you talking about? Who's the bloke?

So, yeah, it's a bit weird to use it on children. However- and this is where language, as always, Australian English included, gets a bit confusing. You can kind of use it endearingly. So, you know, if I was talking to my dad about Noah, Noah, my son being a bit funny, you know, maybe making some jokes, being silly, my dad might say something like, 'Oh, mate, he's such a funny little bloke, isn't he?' You know? So sort of using it in an endearing kind of a way. 'He's such a funny little bloke.' 'What a legend. What a little bloke.' So, you can kind of use it in that sense when it's someone you know and you're trying to be kind of affectionate in Australian English.

But if you were to use it with a stranger out and about, it's not that it would be rude, it would just be confusing if you were talking about a small child and you called them a bloke. The same way that if you called an adult, a kid, 'Check this kid out.' You'd be like, There's an adult there. What kid? What are you talking about? So, yeah, there you go. You can use it for anyone who's gone through puberty and is effectively of an adult male kind of size. That's a bloke.

And I should add here, guys, warning with the word 'sheila'. Sheila is sort of the equivalent of the word bloke, but for women. But it's not used the same way that bloke is used. So typically bloke is a word that men will use talking about other blokes. Women don't typically use the word 'sheila' to talk about other women. It's usually used by men who are being sexist or pejorative or a little too informal when talking about other women. 'Check out this sheila', you know, so it can be seen as rude. So my only warning there is that, you know, if you're find going out there using bloke, but if you were to say sheila to the wrong person, you may offend someone. Okay? So just just be warned. There, there sort of apples and oranges to some degree, if that makes sense. Although they're both fruit, you know what I mean? Anyway, slap the bird, kick it, make it scream. Make that kookaburra sing. And let's get into today's joke.

All right, So today's joke. I thought I would do a bit of a bogan joke. And we have these. These sorts of jokes, you know, 'How do you know you're an ex in English?' So 'how do you know you're an Aussie when you do this?' Or you know you do this and you find this. So here's a typical one of those. "How do you know when you're a bogan?" How do you know when you're a bogan, mate? When you're a bogan- How do you know when you're a bogan? "You mow the lawn and you find a car." Did you get it?

I'll have to explain this story. So it's this weird phenomenon in Australia, and I remember explaining this to my wife. We were driving around the outskirts of Geelong where I live, and there's a few suburbs that are a bit dodgy, right? The sort of lower socioeconomic places. I'm sure the majority of the people that live in these areas are really nice. But there is the odd bogan, right? The odd person that you probably wouldn't want to necessarily have a conversation with or come across. They're a bit rough, a bit dodgy. Anyway, I remember driving, we were just driving through one of these suburbs and Kel kept saying, "Why are there all these cars parked in people's front yards and someone's mown the grass in the yard but not underneath the car."

Like the car's been there so long that the grass has grown underneath the car up alongside of it, and the car's just there with all this long grass under it and around it, but they've mowed around it. So the rest of the grass on the front yard is fine, but the grass around the car isn't. And I'm like, "It's just a very bogan trait. It's a stereotype." It's something that- I don't know what it is, but I think there's a certain demographic in Australia in particular where they'll have a lot of cars, but they won't necessarily have a lot of space to park them in their driveway. And so they'll park them on their front yard and they just let the grass grow. And when they mow the grass, they'll just leave the car there and they don't actually move the car.

It may also be that they have many cars and they they drive more than one, so they just leave it and they're not using that one that often or they're you know, they mean to repair it. They will eventually, but not today. And so it's just a stereotypical thing. Whereas I think in like our suburb, you won't typically see that. Well, for one, we don't really have very, very many big front yards in our suburb. But also I think most people would move the car and then mow the lawn, right? So yeah, I don't know.

It was one of these things that I'm like, Don't they do that in Brazil? And Kels was like, No, my wife, she's like, What? So anyway, that was a funny story. "How do you know you're a bogan?" "You mow the lawn and you find a car", get it? So you've mowed, you've cut all of the grass in your lawn and then a car appears. And that's sort of the joke. All right.

So anyway, today's expression is "to shoot from the hip", "to shoot from the hip". I wonder if you have seen some of those cowboy Western films where they're, you know, doing a shootout. I don't know. Is it even called that where they're facing one another? It's a duel. Right. And they're going to pull their guns out and shoot each other. Typically, they do it from the hip. Right. They just pull their gun just out of it's man should have prepared. I should have prepared. Holster! That's the word I'm looking for. The gun holster. The leather pocket that the gun sits in. They just pull it out and then tilt it. And, you know, Clint Eastwood blows away his enemy. So that is, you know, literally shooting from the hip.

But it has a figurative meaning as well, which you are more likely to hear used in English. Okay. So let's go through the words first.

So, 'shoot', this is to kill or wound a person or animal with a bullet or arrow, right? So, you know, back in the day, cavemen would go out with their bow and arrows and they would shoot prey, they would shoot deer, they would shoot animals to eat with their bow and arrow. But you can also obviously shoot a gun, you know, so police, if they have a shootout with a criminal, they might shoot their guns at the criminal.

'From'. This indicates the point in space at which a journey, motion or action begins. So he's walking away from me. He started near me or with me and he's walking away from me. She goes from here to there. Sorry, my my phone is going off. It's one of those annoying things. I've muted my phone, but it's connected to my computer and so my computer beeps for me instead of the phone. So I'm going to put it on aeroplane mode. Forgive me, guys. So that was from.

'The' or 'the' or 'the'. This is the definitive article, right? This definite thing. This very, very specific thing. This is- God damn, it's still going. This is 'the' gun he owns. This is 'the' chocolate that I love. The, the, the.

A 'hip'. A 'hip'. You should have two of these is a projection of the pelvis and upper thigh bone on each side of your body. Right. Your hips. And it's not just humans, you know, dogs can have hips. What else. Elephants could have hips. Giraffes have hips. Cows have hips. So yeah, hips. So I often pick up my son by his hips and put him on my shoulders. Hips.

Okay, so now let's go through the definition of the phrase "to shoot from the hip". So if you do this figuratively, this is to react without careful consideration of your words or actions, to speak in a very direct and honest way, or to react very quickly, without real consideration, without thinking carefully about something first. Okay.

So I look this up and surprisingly, as we've already sort of covered, it, originates from cowboys and them shooting. Right? Okay. So I did some research into where this expression originated from and the idioms.com says "The origin of this idiom is much older than cowboy shooting in the early days of handheld long arms, rifles, but specifically muskets. Because the ignition mechanism was external, it often would ignite more explosively and cause facial injuries when the rifle was aimed for a precise shot. So riflemen were afraid to get hurt, and as a result, they began the practice of shooting the musket away from their face, even though the aim wasn't as precise. When fired, these guns had a heavy recoil. So rather than support the gun from their shoulder, they supported it from their hip. Thusly, the expression 'to shoot from the hip' implied that an action or words were not precise but approximate and may not exactly hit the target, i.e. achieve the exact result."

So there you go. How cool is that? Really interesting. And I wonder if you guys have an equivalent version of this expression in your native language to shoot from the hip to shoot from the hip. So as usual, let's go through three examples of how I would use this expression in English.

So example number one, imagine you work in an office building, right? You are a white collar worker and you have to regularly have meetings when you go to work each week and, you know, catch up on events and get ready for the week ahead. So in these meetings, you sit down, you sit down around a table, there's loads of people there, managers, your boss, you know, your colleagues, all that sort of stuff. The person that leads the meetings might ask everyone for their two cents, you know, their input. They want to hear everyone's ideas for certain things and they don't care if they're just spontaneous thoughts that come to each person. They just want to hear whatever people are thinking about, right?

So they want everyone to shoot from the hip. They don't want them to carefully consider their thoughts, to react slowly and be more careful and considered with what they're thinking. They want them to just say what they think straight away. Right? So shoot from the hip guys, don't be quiet. Don't think too much. Just shoot from the hip. Tell me what you think.

Example number two. All right, So imagine you're a copper, right? A cop, a policeman or a policewoman. And you come across this devastating car accident one day. You know, there's a huge pile up of dozens of cars. People have been really injured. Maybe there's a few deaths. Stuff's on fire. There's fuel on the road. You know, it's really dangerous. So you have to call the ambos in the ambulance and the paramedics, they come in, they take care of all the injured people that they can sort of rescue and save. And after that, you've got to deal with the crime scene and you've got to try and work out how things unfolded, how these events happened. Right. What led to this thing happening. So maybe there's a few other investigators that come and you guys have to piece together what's going on. So perhaps as you're sort of surveying the scene, looking at all the evidence and trying to work things out, you guys have a conversation about what you think happened. You shoot from the hip with your ideas, right? You spontaneously talk about anything that comes to mind, any ideas that you might have, You're shooting from the hip. You're speaking about these things directly, honestly, spontaneously, without a lot of consideration.

Example number three. A great example of shooting from the hip is the game charades. I wonder if you played this game. Hopefully I've got this right. I think it's charades, right? So this is where you have a partner and there's usually at least two teams.

Obviously, you're working with your partner against someone else, and one of you has to mime to the other person a word or phrase or an idea without using any words, right. Without speaking, without making any noise. So you have to try and help your partner work out whatever it is, right? Like, if it was an apple, maybe you pretend to be taking a bite of something or like you're pulling something out of a tree. You know, you have to try and give these signals.

So people often get quite worked up in this game, right? They're getting very excited, very loud. Everyone's screaming these ideas at the person trying to work out what they're miming when they do this. They're shooting from the hip. Right. They're spitting out every idea that comes to them. They're shooting from the hip.

So hopefully now, guys, you understand the expression to shoot from the hip. This is to react without careful consideration of your words, of your actions. It's to speak directly and honestly. So, as usual, let's go through a little pronunciation exercise. So this is where I'm going to read out a bunch of words and phrases, and I want you to repeat them out loud after me and try and work on your Australian accent. Okay. Are you ready? Let's go.

To. To shoot. To shoot from. To shoot from the. To shoot from the hip. To shoot from the hip. To shoot from the hip. To shoot from the hip. To shoot from the hip. To shoot from the hip. I'm just shooting from the hip. You're just shooting from the hip. He's just shooting from the hip. She's just shooting from the hip. We're just shooting from the hip. They're just shooting from the hip. It's just shooting from the hip.

All right. Good job, guys. Now, let's go over a few things that are going on there in terms of connected speech and pronunciation to shoot from the hip, to shoot from the hip. Can you hear the schwa sound in any of these words? Like which words are being emphasised and which ones are being reduced to shoot from the hip? So the words that are getting emphasised are 'shoot' and 'hip', right? The verb there, to shoot, and hip, the noun to shoot from the hip. And 'to' 'from' and 'the' are all getting reduced and given a schwa sound that /ə/ vowel sound right. Like someone's being punched in the stomach. /ə/ /ə/ /ə/ to shoot from the hip. To shoot from the hip. To shoot from the hip. And you may notice the T at the end of the word shoot turn into a stopped T right. A muted T before the F consonant at the start of the word 'from'. To shoot from the hip. To shoot from the hip. To shoot from the hip. And P at the end of the word 'hip' is also getting stopped.

You can release it, you can stop it sort of up to you. To shoot from the hip. So that's stopped to shoot from the hip. And that's released. Hip, hip, hip, hip. All right. And then when we're saying the phrase 'I'm just shooting from the hip', something really interesting that's happening there that I thought I would explain. And we go over this in my pronunciation course.

There's some interesting stuff happening with the consonant clusters in 'just' and 'shooting'. So you've got S and T at the end of the word 'just' right, 'just' /st/ the S and the T. And then at the start of the word 'shooting', you've got this /sh/ sound, right? 'Just' 'shooting'. Now listen to what happens when I say this quickly. 'I'm just shooting from the hip.' And actually I almost overdid it then because I was thinking about it too much. Let me try that again. I'm just shooting from the hip. Yeah, there you go. Ju/sh/ shooting. Ju/sh/ shooting. I'm ju/sh/ shooting from the hip. What do you notice happened to the S and the T? So you can kind of do the S sound and go into the S sound and just not say the T Ju/sh/ shooting. Ju/sh/ shooting. Ju/sh/ shooting. But if you speak really quickly, you're probably just going to go straight to the /sh/ sound, the sh because it almost has an S in it anyway, right? So, /ju/◡shooting. So instead of saying just shooting, you'll hear /Ju/◡shooting. /Ju/◡shooting. /Ju/◡shooting. /Ju/◡shooting. Pretty cool, huh? So that is what happens quite often. Two consonant clusters where you have multiple three or more clusters, three or more clusters, three or more consonants in a row. Okay.

So if you want to learn more about this and you want to sound more Australian when speaking English to develop your Aussie accent and your Aussie pronunciation, learn all this sort of stuff. The different vowels, consonants in Australian English, the connected speech that we use. Check out my Australian pronunciation course you can get it at AussieEnglish.com.au/apc. And I think this week when this gets released you should be receiving some emails about a special deal that I am doing on three or more courses, including the Minimal Pairs course, the Spoken English course and the Aussie Pronunciation course at a big discount. So yeah, go and check it out then. If you haven't received any emails about it, send me an email and I'll give you a deal on it. Okay.

So anyway, guys, this is turned into a bit of a long episode. I hope you don't mind the last section. Here is a clip from the TV show Fisk. The second season of this has just been released. It's a comedy and the excerpt is "A corporate lawyer must take a job at a suburban law firm after her life implodes in Sydney and struggles to find her feet navigating grief, money, family and entitlement." So the rules of the game. I'm going to play a clip from this show for you twice. And your goal is to listen and then write down what you hear being said. Remember, you can check your listening comprehension by downloading the free worksheet with today's episode. You can get this via the podcast page on whatever podcast app you're using. The link should be there, or you can go onto my website to this podcast episode and the link will be there to download the free transcript.

And you can obviously write, you can print this out, there's space for you to write out what you think you hear being said and the answer is at the bottom. Alternatively, if you're a premium podcast member, you'll be able to check the answer in the transcript. Okay, so are you ready? Here's the first playthrough.

I just need to clarify exactly how long you were in a relationship with Mr. Munster. Five minutes. Um, Instagram begs to differ.

Good job, guys. All right. How did you go? Did you get all of it? Time for the second playthrough.

I just need to clarify exactly how long you were in a relationship with Mr. Munster. Five minutes. Um, Instagram begs to differ.

All right. Good job, guys. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I'll see you next week. Cheers.