Transcript of AE 1189 - Expression: The Jig Is Up

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, you mob! How's it going? Welcome to this episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to level up their Australian English. So I am your host Pete. And as always, it's a pleasure to be here chatting away, chatting away, talking about an English expression, but also hopefully sharing some other Aussie cultural and news and current affairs facts, all the, all that sort of jazz, right?

So yeah, that's the whole point of the podcast. To help you improve your English, but also learn more about Australia. So it's been a good week, guys. We got, we got a cat about, what would it be now, about ten days ago, and her name is Peaches. She is a tortoiseshell cat. We adopted her from yeah, from Cat Rescue, I guess, after- oh, after the shenanigans that we had with a breeder. I think we went into that in the previous episode. So yeah, I'll save it here. But she has been settling in really well!

For the first few days, she was hiding under the bed, sort of a little bit nervous. You know, all the surroundings were all new. There were kids running around. There were adults she didn't know, but she sort of came around within about three or four days, was coming out, getting pats, hanging out with us. And now she's just another member of the family and it's like she's yeah, she's always been here. So it's really cool to have a little land mammal inside the house running around. Although she gets up to all kinds of antics late at night. I think my wife the other night threw a cushion at her. Not in a nasty kind of way, but to get her to stop. I think she was, she was doing some sort of weird scratching, slashing at some of the stuff on the ground near the bed. And it was just making a lot of noise. So just waking up and my wife just being like, "Stop it!"

Anyway, so that's been a lot of fun. Guys, I hope you're going well. Don't forget, if you want the transcripts to these episodes, you can get access to those at www.AussieEnglish.com.au/podcast

You'll be able to get all the transcripts for every single episode except for the Pete's 2cents episodes, which don't have transcripts with them. So you'll have access to almost 1200 episodes, I think now. We've got loads, loads and loads and loads. It will probably take you a year or two to go through each of these and study them and learn the vocab and the expressions.

If you did well, yeah. If you did one or two or three a day, it's going to take you quite a while. So there's loads in there guys. You get the transcripts, you can print them out, you can take notes on them. You can also obviously read them online and you can use the Premium Podcast player to read and listen at the same time. The text moves for you on the screen, so you can just read as the audio plays. So yeah, go to www.AussieEnglish.com.au/podcast to sign up for that membership. And guys, yeah, it is time to get into the Q&A.

So today's question comes from Hamed and he asked "What are bell peppers called in Australia? When I go to Subway-", so the takeaway food franchise in Australia, Subway, "no one knows what a bell pepper is." And I mean, so I know what a bell pepper is because of American TV shows, right? So they call what we call capsicums, they call them bell peppers. Bell peppers. So I looked up Wikipedia, I looked up "Capsicum is a genus of flowering plants in the nightshade family," and I'll see if I can pronounce this correctly, Solanaceae. So this is "native to the Americas and it's cultivated worldwide for chili peppers and bell peppers in the genus Capsicum." But other fruit and veggies inside the nightshade family include potatoes and tomatoes. And I think there are a bunch of other things as well.

But why do Australians say capsicum? So I did a bit of searching and I looked up an article on www.news.com.au that was talking about some of these interesting phrases and expressions that are unique to Australia. And here is what they had to say. "Australia and New Zealand, India and Pakistan all call the vegetable capsicum in reference to its scientific name capsicum annum originating from America. It's thought that the US and the UK call it a bell pepper and pepper respectively," so the US calls it a bell pepper, and the UK calls it a pepper, "as when colonists first discovered that vegetable centuries ago, they likened it to the spicy chilli pepper. There's a surprising number of differences in the names different English speaking countries give vegetables, though. In the UK, zucchini and eggplant are known by their French names courgette and aubergine. While in the US a yam is a sweet potato and arugula is what we would call rocket." Here in Australia, it's a kind of salad plant. I guess it's the kind of spiky looking salad spinach-y plant, and it's called arugula, apparently. So weird.

"So don't even get started on the whole chips, crisps, fries difference. In Australia, chips is used for both packets of chips and hot chips, while in the UK packets of chips are crisps and chips are hot chips. While in the US, chips are packets of chips and fries are hot chips."

So yeah, there's some big differences there. But yeah, long story short, in Australia we use the genus name for this group Capsicum to refer to bell peppers or peppers. And these are the ones that aren't spicy, so they're red, yellow, green ones that you typically find. They are in the shape of a bell. So I do get it why the US call it that. But when we say pepper, I'm thinking about a spicy member of the capsicum family. So a chilli pepper. I'm not thinking about a capsicum. So there you go. Hopefully that answers your question, Hamed!

Okay, guys, so it's time to slap the bird and let's get into today's joke. So, today's expression is related to dancing and you'll see why later. So I tried to find a joke about dancing as well. So here is the joke. And it is also related to chips, which we just talked a little bit about. Okay, so you're ready for this?

What's a chips' favourite dance? What's a chips' favourite dance? What kind of dance is a chips' favourite dance?

Are you ready? The salsa. The salsa.

Okay, so for anyone here who doesn't get it, a 'salsa' in Australia at least, and probably the US and the UK, I think they would use this as well. It is usually a spicy sauce made up of chopped tomatoes, onions and peppers that is commonly served with Mexican food.

So we often have this with, say, corn chips. You'll often have a dip that is called a salsa. And 'the salsa' is a Latin dance that is associated with the music genre of the same name Salsa, which was first popularised in the United States in the 1960s in New York. So how crazy is that? But yeah, if you were to say 'the salsa', 'the salsa', we would know you're talking about a dance, so, "I can do the salsa." And if you said 'a salsa', or you could say "The salsa that I'm eating now with corn chips", we're talking about a spicy dip for Mexican food usually. Yeah. Corn chips. You might have it with nachos and other things.

So there you go. What's a chips' favourite dance? The salsa. Right, Because the chip gets dipped in the salsa.

Okay, let's get into today's expression, which is "the jig is up". "The jig is up." So we'll first break down the words in the expression, go through the meaning. Talk about the origin, where it came from, go through some examples. We'll then do a pronunciation exercise and then we'll finish up with a little clip from a new Aussie TV show. Okay, so "the jig is up".

A jig. 'A jig' can be a bunch of different things. So you may hear this if you're a fisherman as a squid jig, Right. This is something that you can sort of jig, I guess, up and down. You move it up and down and it has these straight- I guess they're not hooks, but they're kind of burrs, sharp bits of metal that are straight that hook onto the legs of a squid when it grabs on to the jig, a squid jig.

It can also be a type of dance, right? You can do a jig. And I think it's an Irish dance.

But here, "the jig is up", although it does sort of reference the dance indirectly, and that's where it originally came from. Here, 'a jig' would be a practical joke, a trick, a scheme, a ruse.

"Is". I'm sure you will know what "is" is- what "is" is, what is "is". It is the present tense of the verb 'to be' for the singular third person. Right. So, "he is" "she is" "it is".

"To be up." If something is "up", "the jig is 'up'", it is 'finished'. It is completed, it is over. Right. So it's "up". You might hear this in phrases like "Time's up!" So when I was at school doing exams at the end of the exam, you know, a buzzer would go, or a teacher would say, "Time's up". As in the time has finished, you can't keep going. The exam time period is ended, it's completed, "the time is up".

So I wonder if you understand what "the jig is up" means. If someone were to walk over to you and say, "Haha! The jig is up! The jig is up!" It means the scheme or deception has been revealed or foiled, right? So it's used to say that a dishonest plan or activity has been discovered and will not be allowed to continue.

So a ruse, a trick, a practical joke has been seen through, it has been uncovered and it is no longer fooling anyone. "The jig is up".

So I wanted to look up where this came from because it is one of these expressions where you look at it and you kind of like, 'What the hell does this mean? And why do we say jig?' Why do we- why not "The joke is up" or "the scheme is up", right?

All right. So I looked this up, www.Wiktionary.com, great website for, I guess Wikipedia-related stuff related to language.

"Jig is an old term for a lively dance and in the Elizabethan era-" so this is the era of Queen Elizabeth in England. I think this would have been Queen Elizabeth I, so probably around the 1800s. "The word 'jig' also became slang for a practical joke or a trick. This idiom derives from the obsolete slang word." So we don't use 'jig' anymore to say, "Ah, he pulled a jig on someone." We only really use it in this expression.

And I did a little further digging and found on www.English.StackExchange.com someone had commented the following about this question 'What's the origin of this expression? The jig is up', right? So they said "The Oxford English Dictionary finds the etymology of the word jig in its various meanings to be uncertain, but traces the meaning of a practical joke back to 1590."

So quite, quite a long time ago. This sounds like it's before Elizabethan era or England. "So when someone says 'the jig is up', he means that he's no longer fooled by a certain pretense. The expression 'the game is over' also means the same thing", right? That the trickster has been caught and can't keep playing this trick.

So, "the jig is up". Let's go through some examples of how I would use the phrase or the expression "the jig is up" in day to day English. So imagine you're a bit of a prankster and you want to set up a huge practical joke on someone in your family. You know, perhaps it's your dad or mum and you want to annoy them by getting your friends to prank call them. So you have one friend call them up and pretend that he's selling women's bikinis and then you have another friend call up saying that he would like to know if your dad wants to cancel his ballet lessons, which he obviously probably doesn't get. And then another friend calls up and he's like, "Where am I getting these 50 pizzas delivered? Is it to your house?" And so your dad eventually cottons on to the ruse. All right, So he 'cottons on' to something, he works something out, he discovers something.

He works out that this scheme, the practical joke is taking place and he confronts you. He comes up to you and he says, "All right, the jig is up, mate. The jig is up. I know what you're up to. I know what you're being doing. Calling me up, pretending to be all kinds of stuff." "The jig is up. I've discovered the trick. The ruse has been discovered, and it's over. The jig is up."

Example number two, Maybe a little more of a sinister example. A married couple, right? We've got a married couple and one person is cheating on the other person. They're having an affair. So maybe the husband every day goes to work. And, you know, as soon as he slams the door shut and drives off down the street, the postman arrives to deliver the mail, but to also deliver a bit of hokey pokey to his wife. So he enters the house and they get down and dirty, if you know what I mean. So one day the husband comes home a little early, spontaneously. For some reason, you know, he just felt there's something weird on the wind today. I need to come home. And he catches his wife, in the act! With the postman getting it on! Bumping uglies! Doing the nasty! And he says, "You know what? I always knew something was going on. The jig is up. I finally found you two shagging each other, my wife having an affair."

"The jig is up. We're getting a divorce. I'm going to take you to the cleaners. I'm going to take everything you've got. The kids are going to live with me." "You can have the postie. You can have the postman keep him. Keep doing your nasty stuff with him. I'm taking everything else. The jig is up."

Example number three. Imagine you've got kids at high school, and one of them doesn't seem to be the brightest kid, right? You love him to bits, but he's not the sharpest tool in the shed, if you know what I mean. Right? He's not- he's not that good with his marks usually at school. All of a sudden, Year 12 comes around and he's getting As. A+s, A++s, on different exams and tests. And his report card comes home and it's like you've got a frickin' genius of a son when previously he absolutely hated study. He wasn't intellectual at all. And now all of a sudden, he's, you know, turned a new leaf and is apparently a total genius when it comes to his subjects at school. But then you finally cotton on to things. You finally realise he's been changing his grades! He's been changing his grades, he's been fabricating his marks! He hasn't been getting As, and A+s and A++s. He's been changing them. He's still flunking his classes.

So you might confront him and say, "Mate, the jig is up. We know that you're bullshitting us. We know that you're lying. You're fabricating these marks. You're not getting A+s. You're lying! The jig is up!"

So hopefully now, guys, you understand the expression "the jig is up". It means that the scheme or deception is revealed or foiled. If something is foiled, it is stopped. Prevented. It is an expression that is used to say that a dishonest plan or activity has been discovered and will not be allowed to continue, that a ruse or trick has been seen through. Thus, it is no longer fooling anyone. "The jig is up".

So as usual, guys, let's go through a little pronunciation exercise. So I'm going to read out some phrases here where you can listen and repeat these out loud to work on your Aussie accent. As I always say, if you're working on any other kind of accent, that's cool too, just read these lines out after me in the accent of your choice. Okay. Ready to rock? You're ready to go? Let's do it. The. The jig?.The jig is. The jig is up. The jig is up. The jig is up. The jig is up. The jig is up. I said the jig is up. You said the jig is up. He said the jig is up. She said the jig is up. We said the jig is up. They said the jig is up. It's said the jig is up. Great work, guys.

So let's go through a little bit of connected speech here. What are you hearing when I say "the jig is up"? "The jig is up". "The jig is up". We're linking those words together. /Jig‿is‿up/ /Jig‿is‿up/. So effectively, what's happening here is we've taken the words "jig", "is", and "up". And we've made it so that every single syllable starts with a consonant sound. So because "is" and "up" start with vowel sounds as words, what we do is take the previous words' consonant sound. So the /g/ at the end of 'jig' goes to the start of the word 'is', and that /s/ at the end of the word 'is' goes to the start of the word 'up'.

So it sort of shifts forward. The /jig‿is‿up/. /Jig‿is‿up/. /Jig‿is‿up/, /jig‿is‿up/. So this is something you'll notice all the time in spoken English, when there are consonants that are at the ends of words. And then the next word starts with a vowel sound, the consonant will shift onto the front of the next word effectively and start the syllable that is the front of that word. So instead of saying /Jigj /is/ /up/, we take those consonants at the ends of some of those words, move them forward onto the starts of the syllables. Jig‿is‿up, the jig‿is‿up, the jig‿is‿up.

Remember, if you want to learn more about this, go and check out my Australian Pronunciation Course. Inside, you will learn how to use the International Phonetic Alphabet so that you can study on your own and improve your accent, your pronunciation without the help of anyone else. You can do it on your own. Once you understand how to use the International Phonetic Alphabet, and then you'll go through how to say all the different consonant sounds and vowel sounds in Australian English with detailed tutorials and then exercises and tongue twisters all in video format and audio format.

And then lastly, I have 25 advanced pronunciation lessons showing you things like Connected Speech, how to do the Australian R sound, linking, everything like that. So you can go and check this out at www.AussieEnglish.com.au/apc

So now guys, for the final section of this episode, I'm going to play you a little clip from a new TV show from Australia called Troppo. Now, for any of you guys who don't know, Troppo T R O P P O, is from the Aussie slang expression "to go troppo" and this means to go crazy, or to act strangely, as a result of tropical heat. So if you live up somewhere, say Darwin or Cairns, or maybe the Kimberley region in the northern parts of Australia, the heat and the tropical humidity might get to you eventually. And so if you go a bit crazy, you act a little strangely, you 'go troppo'. So the excerpt for this TV show is an eccentric private investigator with a criminal past recruits a disgraced ex-cop to help solve the disappearance of a Korean tech pioneer in the wilds of far North Queensland.

So the rules of the game, guys, I'm going to play a clip for you two times, and your goal is to listen and then write down what you hear. Today is a bit of a long one, so don't be ashamed if you need to go back and replay it a few times, you know, it's 100% normal. To get the answer, you can download today's free worksheet or if you are a Premium Podcast Member and you have access to the transcript, you will obviously see the text in the transcript as well.

So, you're ready to go? Here's the first playthrough.

I told you this was something. I told you to stay put. How is this not a good thing? It means we're on the right track. What's the problem? You!

Good job, guys. So how did you go? Did you get all of it? Time for the second playthrough.

I told you this was something. I told you to stay put. How is this not a good thing? It means we're on the right track. What's the problem? You!

All right! So that's it for me today. Guys. I hope you're having a good one. I am going to go and scoot down the road and pick up my kids from day-care, and I will chat to you next time. Thanks for joining me. See you later.