Daily Dose of English 30
Earbuds
Daily Dose of English 30
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 earbuds. because we, a lot of people use them every day for many, many hours. And again, I think that's kind of interesting. There's a lot of stuff in our day-to-day lives that I often wanna talk about just because I think it's sort of interesting to think about these things that are fairly fundamental to our lives. And we don't really think about them. And one of them is earbuds, right? The things that you put inside your ears to listen to music. Let's start with the name again. I think we did that yesterday as well. An ear obviously is what you use your ear in. And then the bud part is a bud is typically a small round-ish sort of thing that goes on the end of something. And so another common example is like a flower bud on a plant is the little green piece that's going to turn into a flower. But it's just a little bud at the beginning. There are other ways that we use the term, the word bud, but it sort of has to do with a little thing that is budding or a very small roundish thing that is going to turn into something else. And we call them ear buds because they look like that, an ear bud. They go in your ears and you listen to stuff through them. There's lots of different kinds of earbuds nowadays. And I am particular to wired earbuds. Wired earbuds are the ones that you plug in. Because, I like them because one, they never run out of battery. Two, they sound better. And three, are way, way cheaper. Like you can get a very nice pair of earbuds for 20, 30 bucks. And, but if you wanna get some Bluetooth earbuds of this, of like the similar sound quality, you're gonna have to spend 150 bucks probably, right? So much more just because the technology to send sound over the air is a lot more complicated than sending it through a wire, right? That's sort of just the inherent, I guess the root problem. You can't really do it much more efficiently because it's just going through a wire which is actually pretty simple. In fact, a lot of sound engineering stuff is very interesting, but also weirdly simple, which is sort of cool because sound is just a wave. And so even fairly nice microphones use pretty simple technology. Sure. It gets better and better, right? There's a lot of very specific stuff into it, but at the base level, it's sort of simple, which I think is pretty. beautiful in a lot of ways. There's a lot of beauty in simplicity, right? Things that get super complicated and there's all these things happening at once is also interesting and intricate, but it lacks that sort of simplicity and beauty in that way. Um, so yeah, I have lots of different earbuds, but I primarily use two because I do also like, uh, wireless earbuds for a lot of uses. Um, because if I'm walking or I'm doing something around the house, I don't really want to be tethered down. That's a good word. Tethered is when you are tied to something specifically. So in the case of an earbud, I have to plug into my computer essentially. So I'm tethered to my computer because if I get up, they will pull out of my ears, right? I'm tethered. You can also, if an animal might be tethered up, if they have a rope connected to the animal and then it connected to a barn or a house or whatever. It's not a super common word and we specifically use it when you are connected to something, often in technology actually, right? You can tether your phone to a different network or share it or whatever it is. It's not a very common word, but I used it for some reason. So I explained it. That's why we're here. What was I saying though? Earbuds, oh, the wireless ones, because they are very nice, right? And I use my AirPods all the time, because also the noise canceling earbuds are insanely useful. If you live somewhere that's loud, or there's something, some music playing that you don't want to listen to, or really for whatever reason, and you want to focus or not hear the outside world as much, they're really, really good for that. It's very surprising. Wireless earbuds are also almost required if you want to go to the gym. You can do it with wired earbuds, obviously, people have done that for many, many years, but it's a lot more annoying and it's just a nicer, if you have the option to use wireless earbuds, you probably want to because then you don't have to carry your phone, you don't have to worry about getting tangled. There's just so many benefits. I remember kind of the last time I used to go to the gym, we talked about this a couple days ago, but the last time I was going to the gym regularly, wireless earbuds weren't really that popular yet and wired earbuds were still the default. And so I would use those and I would have to adjust them or fix them or mess with them every 30 seconds because they would just keep getting in my way. Now, I also wanna talk a bit about the name earbuds because in my accent, in my part of the US, we often say headphones when we mean earbuds. And there is technically a difference, like if you look up the difference, but we use them sort of interchangeably as headphones. I'm not really sure why, probably just because people started using the words like that because they do the same thing, right? They put sound into your head, into your ears. Headphones are are specifically technically the ones that go over your ears in or sort of they put sound into your ears and they're like one thing where they usually are connected at the top with like a headband of some kind. And they often sort of completely cover your ears in some way. Those are headphones, right? Those were actually, I don't, they were probably first when they, when earbuds and headphones are first started to become a thing back 20-ish years ago. No, more than that, way more than that. Yeah, it must've been like 50 years ago at this point, probably in the seventies or maybe even earlier. Anyways, that's a total non sequitur. Oh, okay, I have to keep explaining these words because that's another really rare, strange word. Non-sequitur is a very random thing to start talking about that's maybe a little bit related to something that you said, right? I kind of misspoke on the when headphones maybe were invented and then I started thinking about that, right? And I made this weird non-sequitur. Again, you might hear that word sometimes, and that's what it means. But it's very rare. Don't try to memorize it or anything like that. So I apologize for maybe confusing you. Anyways, what am I talking about? I feel like I'm going crazy right now. But here we are, seven minutes into this episode about earbuds and headphones. And I'm talking about the 1970s and non sequiturs. But you know what? Life brings us to interesting places and I'm just here for the ride. So, oh yeah, headphones are often just earbuds when we talk about them. So don't be confused if somebody says, hey, we give you my headphones and you only see earbuds. They mean those. Earbuds, like I said at the beginning, are used by a lot of people all the time. I know that I have my earbuds in for a very large portion of the day because I work on my computer and I need to hear sound. I really don't like using speakers, so like desk speakers, because one, I don't hear it very well. I much, much prefer earbuds because I can hear better. And two, because I don't really like the feeling of sort of putting my sound out into the world. It just feels very, I don't know, weird. So I have a heavily prefer using earbuds and headphones when I'm working just to better hear what I'm doing. It also blocks out sound a little bit so that I don't hear as much of the outside world. But it can be sort of tiring, right? You don't wanna have earbuds in for too many hours because it can sort of wear out your ears. And so I make sure to take them out pretty often and massage myself a little bit because I do have very, actually very small ears, like weirdly small. And so they can definitely start to hurt, but I've gotten pretty used to it. So at this point there, they've sort of figured out how to live with headphones. But I do always have to put on the smallest nibs. Ooh, there's a good word. Nibs, I don't even know if it's the official word, but I call them nibs, are the things that you put on the tip of an earbud to put it into your ear. They're usually made of foam or of rubber. And I almost always use the smallest, smallest nib to put in my ear. Nib? Yeah, that's what I call them. And yeah. For my AirPods though, it's sort of funny because I only could hear out of one ear. And so I only use one AirPod most of the time. And so it does look a little bit funny when I only have one AirPod in and I can't hear anything because I'm listening to something. But it does mean that I get double the battery life if I ever need to. I remember once I was on a road trip on my own and I was using my earbuds because the car stereo was terrible. AirPods, AirPods, AirPods only last for a couple of hours. Let's say, I don't know, three hours or so. And so I would use the left earbud only. I would listen to something for three hours and then it would die. And I'd switch to the right earbud and listen for another three hours while the other one charged. And then I could switch back and forth. And I basically never had to worry about the battery life of my AirPods because I'm half deaf, because I can only hear out of one ear. It's a weird, useful side effect, I guess. I don't recommend going deaf in one ear, but there are a couple of benefits, not going to lie. So anyways, all right. I think that's my entire episode on earbuds. I don't really have anything else to say. I hope that you learned a couple of interesting words today and maybe enjoyed this episode, but that's everything for today. I'm really glad that you could make it and I hope to see you again tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.
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