“Too short” is the resounding answer, whenever I ask this question in my sessions. I often wonder why we can’t work at the weekend and have Monday to Friday off? That would definitely make for a better work-life balance, wouldn’t it?
Naturally talking about the weekend involves using the past tense in English. Maybe you remember from school reciting/chanting the irregular verb forms “go, went, gone”, “buy, bought, bought” or even “sit, sat, sat”? Or your teacher shouting “We all know ‘play’ is a regular verb, right, Fritz!”, “So, how do we form a past tense of a regular verb, Fritz?” “Fritz, past tense of ‘play’, please and stop playing with Frederike at once!”.
“Yes, Sir, I also play with Frederike yesterday.”
All the chanting & picking on Fritz is one thing, but often when it comes to putting sentences together in the past, the correct form often goes out of the window and you end up with a very frustrated Fritz.
Anyway, I’ll dive into more detailed aspects of the ins and outs of the past tense this week. Today, I would like to introduce you into what I call ‘verb and friends’ (in grammar speak – phrasal verbs – a verb + (a) preposition(s), which together very OFTEN create a new meanings). Let’s have a look at some useful WEEKEND phrasal verbs.
There is a ‘stop/stay in’, which means to ‘stay at home’ and ‘not go out to a pub, club, restaurant or party’ and there’s a ‘stop or stay out’, meaning ‘not to go home’. We commonly talk about ‘stopping/staying out until the early/wee hours’. Bet you didn’t know that a person who does this can be mockingly called a ‘dirty stop-out’? I didn’t know it’s actually a ‘dirty stay-out’ in American English until I was recently corrected by an American.
If you ‘stop/stay in’ you can decide to ‘stop/stay up late’ (go to bed late) or you drop off (fall asleep) on the couch while ‘chilling out’ (BTW – why is there no ‘chill in’? – ALTHOUGH maybe I’ve just coined a new English phrase – “I chilled in at the weekend” meaning I meditated!
What’s more, you can choose to ‘eat in’ (at home) or ‘eat out’ (in a restaurant/friends etc)’ depending on what ‘turns you on’ at the time – but we’ll not go there now.
After a long night out or an early morning home, you need to ‘catch up on’ some sleep so we sleep longer, get up later which we call to ‘lie in’ or ‘have a lie in’. But please don’t mix it up with to ‘sleep in’ in British English, because it can also mean to ‘oversleep’, “I forgot to set the the alarm clock and slept in/overslept”.
QOTD. 1. What do you think of my new phrase ‘to chill in’ – (only positive comments please) and 2. Did you get a lie-in at the weekend?
resounding (hier: lautstark), to involve (hier: erfordern), to recite sth (auswendig aufsagen), to chant (im Sprechchor rufen), to pick on sb (hier: jdn drannehmen), the ins and outs (alle Einzelheiten), mockingly (spöttisch), to coin a new phrase (einen Ausdruck prägen), to turn sb on (Jdn. anturnen), to catch up on sth (etw nachholen), to lie in or to have a lie in (ausschlafen), to oversleep (verschlafen)
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To recommend (empfehlen), commission (Provision),
Getting a lie-in is a question of definition. 😉 At the weekend my alarm rings at 6:30 a.m. In my opinion that means having a good night‘s rest while others would call it way too early in the morning. But I‘m an early bird through and through and everything else feels like going against my nature.
I second that Jenny !!!!