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Valen: Hello, my name is Valen and this is a lesson on ‘Idioms’. So an idiom is a phrase that uses English words, and it’s an expression, so the words still represent their literal meaning, which is why idioms are sometimes hard to understand for ESL learners.

So today I am going to take you through quite a few idioms that use the word, “all” - All - okay, so all of these idioms that we are going to go through today are commonly used in English conversation, I am not going to teach you any of the really out there ones, these ones are all used quite often.

So the first one we are going to learn is ‘all your eggs in one basket’ - All your eggs in one basket. So when you hear the sentence, you are usually going to hear it as, in the negative, so ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket’. And what it means is because eggs are fragile and they break, if you put all your eggs in one basket and you drop it you are going to lose all your eggs at once. So the meaning of this phrase is don’t put, like spread the risk out, don’t put everything into - so if you are betting something, don’t put all your money on one horse for example. So don’t take a risk where you are going to lose everything, is what this means. ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’.

Okay, the next idiom we are going to learn if ‘all ears’ - All ears; so, we hear with our ears, and if you are listening to somebody and you want to say, ‘I am listening’, a common expression that you would use is ‘I am all ears’. So usually you use this one in reference to yourself, you wouldn’t say, ‘he’s all ears’, you would usually say ‘I am all ears’, so if you are listening, somebody is telling you something, you say, ‘I am all ears’, it means you are listening. ‘All ears’.

Okay. Alright, next idiom is ‘all in your head’ - All in your head; so if somebody says to you, that something is all in your head, it means that you are imagining it, so if you are really worried about something, and somebody says to you, ‘don’t worry it’s all in your head’, what that means is that it’s not really real, you are just imagining it and creating it in your head. So you would use this in reference to somebody else, ‘all in your head’; you could also say ‘I am sure it’s all in my head’, so I am just imagining it or blowing it out of proportion, making it into a really big deal when it’s not really that big of a deal. ‘All in your head’.

Our next idiom using ‘all’ is ‘all in a day’s work’ - All in a day’s work; so what this one means is it basically means that something that’s no big deal, so if somebody thanks you for doing something and you say ‘oh, it’s all in a day’s work’, it just means, ‘no problem don’t worry about it, it wasn’t that big of a deal, it’s all in a day’s work’, it was simple. That one is pretty easy, ‘all in a day’s work’.

Alright - this is the one I really like, ‘all hell broke loose’. So obviously this one is a little more negative than some of the other ones, so if you said, ‘all hell broke loose’, that’s clearly not a good thing, it means there was chaos, so if you were in a situation and you said to somebody ‘and then all hell broke loose’, it means and then there was chaos. ‘All hell broke loose’.

Okay, ‘all over the map’. So a map is a piece of paper that shows an area of land, and if you said that something was all over the map, for example, if a teacher was giving a lecture and it was really difficult to understand and hard to follow, and they were jumping from subject to subject, you would say, ‘that lecture was all over map’, you couldn’t understand it, you couldn’t follow it like a path on a map, if there was no path, it was everywhere, it was un - like it was incomprehensible, it was ‘all over the map’. So you can’t understand it, you are referring to something like a lecture, if someone was talking to you and you didn’t understand, but, and they were saying, just they were jumping around all the time, ‘they were all over the map’.

Okay, we have one more idiom. ‘All eyes on me’. So you could say, ‘all eyes on me’, ‘all eyes on him/her’, the ‘me’ is replaceable, but basically what it means is that everybody is looking at you and sort of waiting for something to happen, so if you are about to give a speech, you would say, ‘and then all eyes were on me’, and it sort of means that everybody is waiting for you to talk, waiting to see what you are going to do next and watching. So you could say, if the president was going to give a speech, okay, ‘all eyes are on him’, and it sort of gives the impression not only that they are looking at them but that they are waiting for something to happen, they are anticipating something.

Okay, so we learned seven idioms using the word ‘all’. We learned, ‘all eyes on me’, ‘all over the map’, ‘all hell broke loose’, ‘all in your head’, ‘all ears’, and ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket’.

And that’s it for today, don’t forget to take the quiz, right underneath the video and visit us at www.engVid.com.