Daily Dose of English 137
Stickers
Daily Dose of English 137
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 stickers. Stickers are fun, right? So stickers are the things that we, well, how do you describe a sticker? Something that you can stick to something that usually has a fun design on it of some kind, or it has a use. And so common stickers are things like, what are common stickers? I'm not very good at this, am I? I don't really use stickers nowadays, but they're those little like essentially paper things that you can put on walls or stuff or your laptop or your bag or whatever you might have. Those are stickers. I feel like I've done a very poor job at explaining them, but I don't really know how else to describe what they are. Stickers are very common things that we use in our day-to-day lives for various, lots of different reasons, although I can't think of them. And so I wanted to talk a bit about them because I have several different memories of how stickers are used and that sort of thing. And so the first, I think, common use for adults that I can have on the top of my head, at least in the US, that's very popular, is to put stickers on your suitcase, on your laptop, and on your water bottle. Those are the three biggest places that you see stickers, especially on laptops and water bottles, because they're things that you carry with you all the time, and stickers are very easy and quick ways to personalize things. Personalization is definitely one of the common uses of stickers because they're pretty easy to make, they're pretty cheap, and they can be anything since they're just pictures that you stick to things, right? And so you'll see a lot of people using stickers for personalization or making their stuff feel more like them or their stuff in some way. There are tons of different kinds, like there's infinite stickers, right? There's not a limit on what you can turn into a sticker. You can even make your own, completely print your own with your own design, with your face on it if you wanted, and stick that to something. And so those sorts of stickers are very, very common. I don't use them. I don't really feel the need to make my stuff personalized or more mine. I sort of like that clean look that it usually comes with. And I hate the sticker residue. Like when you take off a sticker, like that glue that gets left behind, I really don't like. And so if I ever don't want to have a sticker on again, I had to like get that off and it's not fun. And so I ended up just not ever putting stickers on things pretty much ever. I don't, I can't think of, of like a, of a personalized sticker or rather a sticker for personalization that I have right now, like anywhere. I'm sure there's like one or two somewhere, but I cannot think of them. Where would they be? I don't have anything on my laptop, nothing on my water bottle. Yeah, I don't think I have any. But that's not to say that they're not cool. I totally like when people have them or are finding cool stickers, like totally do your thing. I'm not saying that I think it's a bad thing. My personalization choice is to have no stickers though. There's also plenty of other uses for stickers, obviously. They can be informative, right? If you wanna put information on something, right? So a common one is to put a sticker of this way up or instructions on something is easy. They can also be useful for filling space, but what am I trying to say here? Adding a little design to something that's useful in some way, or being information, or there's a good one. So a good sticker that can be useful is a QR code, which you might put on a table in a restaurant to link to your menu. And that way you have a QR code that you can stick to something, and if you need to change it, you can pick it up, or you can Whatever, right? So those stickers are like useful stickers that provide value of some way. Stickers also get used all the time to put information on like a doorway, right, for push or pull. Those are usually not printed onto the door. They're printed onto stickers, then you stick them with something. And so there's tons and tons of stickers that we use for that sort of thing because it's a little bit easier or cheaper to make changes on something in some way. Again, I don't use those a ton. I don't have a big use in my personal life for those kinds of stickers since I don't work with physical stuff that often, but it totally can be useful. I've done it before. I've printed out stuff to stick to things like as information rather than like designs. Um, but I can't think of anything recently. Yeah, I, Also want to talk a bit about stickers as a, because kids are what I usually think of when I think of stickers, and how I would enjoy stickers as a kid. And the memories that I mostly have with stickers are going to, there's three. The first one is going to the supermarket, so the store with my mom or my dad or whatever, and we'd go shopping. And then at the checkout aisle, when you get to go pay for what you bought, there's the clerk behind the counter. And at the store that we went to, they always would offer the kid a couple stickers. They had tons of different stickers that are various little animals or things or whatever. And so I would grab a few stickers and we liked to put them on the window, the back window of the car. And that's something you can actually see relatively common in the US, relatively frequently is that in the back of like a family car, The kids will usually have a specified seat, especially if they use a car seat or something like that, where they have a reason to sit on a certain side. So maybe a kid always sits on the right side in the back seat, and so they sort of end up having their little space in the car. And so in my case, I would put some stickers on the window and build my little collection of stickers. It's also where you can put your stuff or whatever in the back seat, whatever it is. which definitely looks funny because from the outside they just look like, you see the back of the sticker, the blank white part. So it doesn't really look very good that way, but it's fun for kids usually and it's usually not lasting damage and so you could just scrape them off eventually when the kids grow out of it and still have your car looking fine. But that was a memory that I have about stickers. And I don't really know why that came to me, but it was the reason that I decided to record an episode on stickers, even though I don't think about that often, but I did for some reason. The other way that I use stickers was actually by, or actually, I'll use the... Actually, I'll say something else first. Another reason that I remember stickers a lot is from Lego sets. I used to really like Legos. I actually still do like Legos, but in a different way. But I used to build Legos a lot and always ask for Lego sets for Christmas and for my birthday or whatever. and lots of Lego sets have stickers in them. You'll put a sticker for some sort of design onto a piece and then that will become a new fancy little piece in your set. And I remember being very particular about my stickers, wanting to be as careful as possible to put it right on the exact specific location so that it wouldn't be out of, like, off kilter, like, off axis like crooked. Yeah, that's the word. So that it wouldn't be crooked because I wanted them to look exactly perfect on the Lego piece. I wasn't that good at it. I would almost always mess up, but I got okay because it was very important to me that it looked perfect. So, that's something that I definitely remember with stickers. But then I also went through this phase where I tried to make my own stickers for Legos because I wanted to design my own things or whatever. So, I would print these images onto sticker paper because you can just get paper that has a sticky back. And so I'd print things onto sticker paper, and they were actually labels that my mom had, and I would print them on there very carefully, and then like cut them out, and then put them onto my Lego guys, or whatever. It didn't actually work very well, but it was fun to do, and I think it's a good sort of project for a child to do, because it's sort of creative, and it's interesting, and kind of do something that you wouldn't normally do. Sort of a style of arts and crafts, I guess you can say. There are plenty of other uses for stickers. I've already thought of a couple more. A common one is the Hello My Name Is sticker. These are common in the US. If you ever go to an official party or go to an event of some kind where it's important to know somebody's name, they'll usually hand out these Hello My Name Is stickers and you can write down your name on them. People can see your name and that sort of thing. But yeah, that is all the time that I have in this episode. I hope that you enjoyed me talking about stickers and let me know down in the comments. Do you put stickers on your stuff? What kind of stickers do you like? But that's all for today. I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.
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