Podcast: Keep a straight face

Podcast Inglês Online

How are you? No podcast Inglês Online de hoje eu falo sobre os idioms “put on a brave face” e “keep a straight face”. Já conhece? Ouça mesmo assim. Listening nunca é demais, especialmente se você mora no Brasil!

Transcrição

Hi, everyone, this is Ana of Inglês Online, yeah, that’s me with another… I guess another episode of our podcast. How are you guys doing? Here where I live, it is so hot right now, like it’s Brazilian heat honestly, it’s… I think today we’ve reached 35º or 36º, it is really, really hot, and I’ve been eating a lot of ice cream and just kind of waiting for some rain, to be honest… to bring down the temperature a bit, like… What’s the temperature like in Brazil right now? Is it… is it still winter, it is a bit lower, right? Well… lucky you! Here it’s just insufferably hot.

Ok, so, you guys, I was thinking today about a few expressions with the word face. So, one of them is put on a brave face, ok… It’s very, very common, I mean, if you are someone who watches, y’know, American movies or sitcoms more likely than not you’ve come across it… someone has said it. So, what does that mean? Put on a brave face. Let’s say you are going through something and then there’s an outcome that you really dislike, y’know, someone says something that you don’t like or all of a sudden someone gives you some news, y’know, that makes you sad or you remember something or your car breaks… I don’t know, or you have to get on with something under not so ideal conditions and instead of showing that you are sad, instead of showing that you are anything… Like desperate or sad or down, you just put on a brave face and you get going, and you do whatever it is that you had to do, or that people are expecting you to do, and you go ahead and you do it, y’know. You put on a brave face and you don’t really show how are you feeling inside.

I’ve heard from some colleagues at work before that sometimes they can tell that I’m putting on a brave face because, when things don’t really go my way and I’m unhappy: “Oh… Ana you just put on a brave face and you go ahead”. I don’t know, I don’t know that I always do that, sometimes I think my emotions really show on my face – sometimes I cannot keep a straight face, I cannot keep a straight face. So a straight face is a face that doesn’t really let on the emotions that the person is feeling in that moment, so they keep a straight face. You can’t really tell. Picture someone when you give them some… I don’t know, bad news, y’know like they hear bad news and you think that you are sure that this person doesn’t like the news, but they don’t show it, y’know, there’s no emotion on their face, you know what I mean. Some people are like that, they are able to do that, it’s like they keep everything inside and so, when you see someone like that you can say, well… y’know, they kept a straight face all the way through.

The most common way though to use the expression keep a straight face is when you are trying not to laugh at people and that is hard, that is something I have an extremely difficult time with. People who know me well know that, it’s really, really difficult for me to suppress like a smile, at least, when someone is telling me a story that I find really funny. It’s really hard y’now, it’s really hard because sometimes you just… I don’t now, for whatever reason – like you are really not trying to be disrespectful to that person but for whatever reason what they are saying reminds you of something that you think it’s funny. And I’m the kind of person that gets distracted very easily and this is something I have been trying to improve – like, listening better and concentrating better on the person that is in front of me talking to me. But sometimes when you get distracted very easily, y’know, naturally – it’s kind of your personality or something, you kind of remember something, or something else that someone said that makes you smile and sometimes it comes across as disrespectful to the person who is talking to you.

So, that is the most common example, everyone, of where the expression keep a straight face could be used. Y’know, in some situations it is very hard to keep a straight face when someone is telling you something that you can see that they are not laughing about it, they don’t think it’s funny, but for some reason you think it’s funny and it’s hard for you to keep a straight face. You wanna know what a very common example is? Actors! Y’know, sometimes they cannot contain themselves and they cannot keep a straight face when they are shooting something and they break character, they start laughing… And that’s most of the I guess, y’know those blooper scenes that we see on Youtube when characters cannot, sorry… When actors actually – actors, rather, they can’t keep a straight face and they just burst out laughing. I sometimes can keep a straight face and sometimes I just can’t.

Ok, so, those are the two little expressions that I have for today and… have I told you that it’s extremely hot here where I am? Ok, I guess I have, I’m going to just grab a cold drink right now because I am sweating. You guys, you cannot believe how hot it is. I guess I will speak to you soon next week and hopefully things will have cooled down here where I am. Talk to you guys soon – bye!

Key expressions

• put on a brave face
• keep a straight face

Vocabulary

to come across = se deparar ou encontrar alguém ou algo por acaso

go through something = passar por ou enfrentar alguma situação difícil ou complicada

outcome = desfecho de alguma situação, resultado final

insufferably hot = insuportavelmente quente

get on with = continuar, seguir em frente, prosseguir com algo

to come across as = parecer ser, dar ou passar a impressão

break character = sair do personagem, parar de interpretar o personagem

blooper scenes = erros de gravação, gafes cometidas pelos atores, muitas vezes são cenas engraçadas retiradas dos filmes