English Idioms: Fruits and Vegetables!

Ready for a healthy English lesson? Today I'm teaching you fun idioms that you can use in English conversations. We use idioms to express ourselves in a more interesting way. I've 'cherry picked' some of my favourite idioms that have to do with fruits and veggies. They're healthy, colourful, and they'll help you understand English conversations. 'Go bananas' and start Using them in casual situations to sound more fluent in English. I'll teach these expressions using a story and give you examples and explanations for each one. Twelve idioms in total, because we sell them by the dozen!
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TRANSCRIPT

Hello, guys. Welcome back to www.engvid.com, the place to be on the internet to learn your English. Today, we're looking at fruit idioms. They're a useful way of describing various situations that happen in life, mainly in a social context. Okay? So this is good if you're going to be spending some time in an English-speaking country, and you want to drop in a really cool phrase, here. So it's like: "Hey. I'm really cool, because I can use my fruit idioms." Okay? So I'm just going to be telling a story about my mate, Dan, he's a really good friend of mine, using these different fruit idioms, and I want you to be able to use them, too, by the end of the lesson. You've got 10 minutes to master it. Right. Maybe less.

Okay, so, fruit idioms. My mate, Dan. He's had a bad time recently, so he's taken to be... He's taken to become a "couch potato". He started becoming a couch potato. Now, a couch is something you lie on, it's like a sofa. Okay? It's like a sofa, and it's a potato, it's not a very glamorous vegetable, is it? I don't know if you know the football player Wayne Rooney, but we sometimes call him "Potato Head". Yeah, it's not very kind of... It's not like an exotic pineapple, is it? It's like, potato. Yeah? So, a sofa potato. I don't have a brown pen, I'm sorry. So if you're a potato lying on a sofa, you're not going to get the girls, really, and you're not going to have much fun, because you're sort of lying there, watching the football. Yeah? So, a "couch potato" is a lazy person who watches a lot of television, lying down. That's my fruit. Pretty good, huh?

So, Dan, he's lying, he's behaving as a couch potato. So what do I need to do? Well, I need to "dangle a carrot". I need to invite him to enter, and to participate in life. Participate: to take part in. So, I dangle. I say: "Dan, come and have some beer. Dan, we're going surfing. Dan, I'll give you some money. Come with me." Okay, so I... To dangle a carrot, it's like I imagine that Dan is maybe a goat. I imagine he's an animal that wants to eat a carrot. So if I offer my animal a carrot, he's going to follow my carrot. So I've drawn some money. If I'm... If I'm offering him some money, maybe he comes towards me. "Dangle a carrot". It's like to kind of... To offer a reward, maybe. Offer reward.

Now, Dan really likes the carrot that I dangled. And so we went to a party, and we "went bananas". Yeah? "Went", past tense of "go". So we went bananas. We had a really good party. Yeah! Yeah? This is me, and this is Dan, he's saying: "Yeah! I'm having a good time." Okay?

And then he was "full of beans". Yeah? He's a happy chap. He's full of energy. The opposite of couch potato. He's full of beans. He's ready to play sports, he's ready to do anything. Okay? Rah. Full: complete. Full of beans. Imagine little beans of energy.

Unfortunately, a bad person came along, and he was... Me and Dan both thought that he was a bad... "Bad apple". Okay? A "bad apple" is not a nice person. Little bit... Ooh, bad apple. Yeah? It's like: "Ooh, stay away." Okay?

And he was rotten... So if I'm eating an apple, and it's kind of a bit mushy, it's not very nice, and it's got like insects in it, okay? It's rotten. Okay? It's an old apple that's... It's no longer any good. Okay? It's rotten. This is the core in here. So if it's rotten, it's not just this bit that's rotten; it's all the way to the core, all the way in. So all of it is bad. All of this person is bad. He's rotten all the way through him. Okay? Bad person.

So we don't like this bad person. So, what we do is we "upset the apple cart" a little bit. Now, "upsetting the apple cart". This is a phrase from quite a long time ago. Probably 100 years ago in the markets, especially in Fulham, North End Road, good place to go and check out if you're visiting London. You'd have these market people, and they'd be pushing their carts of apples, and saying: "Pound for a bag. Pound for a bag. Come and buy my lovely apples."