Daily Dose of English 113
Bidets
Daily Dose of English 113
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about bidets. Bidets, what a funny word, huh? There's actually a T in that word, but you wouldn't know by listening to it because it's at the end, and it's because it comes from French. And there are a lot of words in English that come from French that we still pronounce kind of French-like, but don't necessarily, but don't spell differently, rather. Another example, so we have bidet, ballet, hors d'oeuvres, although fun fact about hors d'oeuvres, like we do totally change the pronunciation because they wouldn't say hors d'oeuvres like that even close, but it fits with English, how English's grammar works better. So hors d'oeuvres, bidet, ballet, there's probably more, but I'll leave the list there. Although, English's connection to French is also why there are so many shared words with basically all Romance languages, right? Words like conversation, anything that ends in a shun, conversation, dedication, is basically the same in like all of the Romance languages. So French, Italian, Spanish, what else? Portuguese is the other big one, then there's also Romanian. But, That's why English has so many words that seem so similar to these Romance languages, despite not being a Romance language itself. English is a Germanic language, and you can see that in the littler words, the grammar words, right, of, from, I, me, those ones fit a little bit better with Germanic languages than with Romance languages. They're all connected, right? All European languages are connected in some way, except for like Hungarian and Basque. But that is not what I'm talking about today. I don't know why I started talking about that. But we're talking about bidets, which are things you use to clean your butt or other parts of your body after using the restroom. And bidets, honestly, are fantastic, especially now that we have really nice ones that use some pretty simple technology and clean you better, essentially. I have a bidet. It's a very simple, pretty cheap bidet, relatively speaking, because there are some bidets that can cost like $500, but this one is a tenth that price, and it is much simpler. You just turn it on either high stream or low stream, and you can change how much water gets through. It's just water. And I really like having a bidet because it feels way cleaner, I think is the main thing. So after I use the restroom, I definitely want to clean myself well, because it's just kind of gross to go around if you don't clean yourself, is how I think about it, right? Like if you accidentally touched a toilet with your hand, you would wash your hand with soap and water. But if you do that with your butt, do you just not care? At least in the U.S., the most common thing is only to use toilet paper, which is just dry paper, which can't get everything. It's not like literally gross because you keep it inside your pants and your underwear and everything, but it still kind of is a little bit. I don't know. I just don't like it. If I don't have the option to have a bidet, I like to use wet wipes because, again, cleaner and just easier. I feel like I use less paper as well. Right, an example, I have a bidet. It's pretty simple. It actually doesn't work great because the water pressure is not super high here. It's better with higher water pressure. But I have a bidet, and so when I use the restroom, I don't actually use any toilet paper. And I ran out of toilet paper a few days ago. And that was not an issue. It was just for like blowing my nose or something, but I can use other things for that if I really need. And so it's nice to not really have to worry about that because I don't need it. It also means that I use less toilet paper, which is just better overall for like waste. Although that's not really a huge issue. It's just toilet paper, but like, Less is better, right? And so I definitely recommend, even if you can, a simple, cheap bidet can be really, really nice. I actually got my parents a bidet for some holiday, I think it was for Christmas or something, a couple of years ago, or maybe their birthday, because actually me and my parents have our birthdays basically in the same few weeks from, yeah, the same 10-day period, my dad, then me, then my mom. And so I got them for a birthday, I got them a bidet for their house. And they really like it. They love it. It was a little bit difficult to install, mostly because the toilet is right up against the wall. And so it's just hard to get back there and plug things in. But the actual installation is really easy. It's just if you can access the back of your toilet. Anyways, I got them a bidet and they loved it, or they love it currently still. And they're like, oh my God, this is great. And both of them never really used them. And they're like, this is gonna be weird, right? I'm like, no, just try it. And they go, oh, I get it now. It's really nice. It's refreshing, it's clean. And so I got one for my grandma as well because I thought it would be fun. And they're not like that expensive. They're like 50 bucks, which is a pretty good deal for something that is basically never gonna break. And so you just get to keep it for years and years. And so I got my grandma one as well, but she didn't like it. It was too cold is what she said. She didn't like how cold it was on her bum. And so my parents were like, okay, we'll take it and put it in the downstairs bathroom, because they have a couple of different bathrooms. And so they're trying to put bidets in all of the toilets now, because it is a lot nicer. I know that I definitely prefer to use the toilet with a bidet, because it has a bidet. And yeah, I don't know, it's just nice. And I've heard that a lot about Japan as well. A lot of people when they go to Japan will mention that, oh yeah, it's really nice to use the restroom there because everywhere has a very nice bidet. Not like the cheap one that I have, like an actual nice one, like the ones that are sort of expensive and they are, I don't know, bigger things like whole products. I don't really know how it works really, but they're a lot fancier. The simple bidet like I have is just water, right? It just shoots water up your bum and cleans it for you and then you dry off, that's it. But the fancy ones have a bunch of buttons. They can do things like heat the seat. They can open the seat lid for you. They can do different streams of water, lots, a little bit. They can aim. They can heat the water for you so you can actually have warm water on your bum. They can play little sounds or music for privacy. There's so many different things that these bidets can do. And it's kind of ridiculous, like the amount of stuff. And I thought that that was just, it was ridiculous, just a gimmick. There's no reason to get a $500 bidet, right? They're just dumb. But I went to somebody's house who had one probably about a year ago. And it's nice, it's really nice. The heated seat and just the extra levels. Oh, and they often have a drying mechanism so they can dry you for you. And I used it and I was like, oh, okay, I get it, I get it now. And if you think about it, you use your toilet every single day, right? And if you're gonna keep the bidet for, let's even say it breaks in five years, which probably seems pretty quick actually, Let's say even a 100 a year, and there are 52 weeks in a year, so approximately 50 cents, no, $2 per week, right? Yeah, $2 per week, which is well under a dollar a day for a bidet. If I do even more math, $1 would be three and a half days, and so something like 30 cents a day. that's pretty worth it. Like I would just pay that to use somebody's house that has a bidet in it. I would pay 30 cents a day for sure. Um, because when you think about it at that scale, it's really not bad. And so if your bidet lasts more than five years, it's kind of going to be worth it. So I think that's going to be one of the first things I buy if I ever get a, a permanent or when I get a permanent house, hopefully that happens. I don't know that the housing economy is fucked up. But that's a whole other story. Maybe I'll talk about that soon. That's kind of an interesting story because I know that, well, obviously none of you were from English-speaking countries originally or else you wouldn't be learning English. I mean, maybe, right? Maybe you grew up in a, yeah, I have met people from the US who just grew up in like really specific parts of the country where they don't really speak English. So hello, if you are from the US or other English-speaking countries. But there's a big problem with real estate and that sort of thing. And so maybe I'll share a bit of what's happening in a lot of the English speaking world in terms of the economy, because I find it really interesting. But anyways, that is enough on my episode about bidets. And I hope that you enjoyed and maybe learned a little something. And if you're curious, definitely look them up and see if it's worth cleaning your bum a little bit nicer. But that's all that I have for today. Thank you very much for listening. And I will see you again in another episode of A Daily Dose of Ang Losh. Bye-bye.
For email updates, subscribe to my blog via email or RSS feed.