Daily Dose of English 60
Glasses
Daily Dose of English 60
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 glasses. And actually, in a sort of fun bit, we're gonna talk about two different topics today, but both of those topics are called glasses, because we use the word glasses to mean two totally different things in our everyday lives. We'll start with the first one, which is glasses that go on your face to help you to see, so eyeglasses. I wear glasses. I've worn glasses for the past couple of years. Not actually for that long. I think I got my glasses in 2020, I want to say. Sometime in 2020. But I don't exactly remember when. And I started wearing glasses. Glasses, like I said, they're what you put on your face. I'm sure you've seen them or heard of them or potentially are wearing them right now. And they help you to see better because a lot of people have slight problems with their eyes for plenty of different reasons. And glasses can often help. They can help you to see better or further or sharper, or they can help you to see closer sometimes. And I wanna talk about a couple of these vocab words and how we talk about glasses in English and that sort of thing. So the first thing that you might think about with glasses is what's called your prescription. Your prescription is the, I guess the strength of your glasses. And a lot of people have very strong prescriptions where their glasses are basically useless to somebody else because they're very specific to that person's use case. Or they're a very light prescription. So for example, my glasses have a very light prescription. I only need a slight correction of things to help me see better. And so I would say that my prescription is very light. In fact, it's so sort of common and light that most people, if they wear my glasses, say, oh, these are nice. These help me see. Whereas if somebody with a strong prescription gives you their glasses, it's going to be hard to see and potentially give you a headache. It might hurt your head. And so for example, my mom has a pretty strong prescription. She can't see super well out of, or she can see fine, but her eyes like work differently. And so she needs a pretty strong prescription to make it easier for her to see. And so in her glasses case, she always writes a prescription, don't steal, these are useless to you. Because glasses like that that look nice in the United States are pretty expensive. And so people sometimes steal glasses and they sell them. However, if it's a strong prescription, if they steal it, it just becomes garbage because nobody wants a strong prescription. And so she would try to clarify, be like, please don't steal these. They're useless to you, but I need them, please. And so that's not super common. A lot of people have pretty normal prescriptions. And glasses have gotten a lot less expensive nowadays, which is great. Glasses used to be really expensive, and now they're just normally expensive, which is still not great if you get them stolen, but it's not the worst thing. The glasses, the prescription itself, like the lens is the word I wanted to get to, is the glass part. And we call that a lens because it has, it filters, or not filters, it shapes the light a little bit differently. It bends the light a little bit differently than just the air would if nothing was there. And so people who don't wear glasses but still need some kind of corrective lens, they're going to wear contact lenses, which are the versions of glasses that go into your eyes and sit there inside your eyes. I'm thinking about glasses a little bit because I recently sat on my glasses and I've never broken my glasses before, but I left them on the bed and I sat down and I broke one of the hinges. A hinge is the part that lets you the glasses fold together. So when they're on your face, right, they're pretty big, right? You need to fit your fat head inside. And so when you want to take them off or put them down, it's really, really handy to be able to close the glasses to make them much smaller. And those hinges are what allows the glasses to sort of have joints to have them to let them close. And so one of the hinges on my glasses broke a little bit, and it bent out of shape. Thankfully, they still work, and so it stays on my head. It's just really loose now. And I really should get it fixed, because it's pretty unstable. And so for the first time in my life, I'm going to have to get new glasses. I've gone almost four years with these glasses, I think. And I feel kind of dumb for sitting on them. But I did, so that's where we are. But thankfully, the lenses still work, so those didn't break or anything like that. And yeah, that's the story about glasses. So let's talk about glasses. Glasses are something that we drink out of and they're made of glass. And we tip, it's very, very common to call it a glass. For example, a glass of water, a glass of juice, something like that. There are some pretty specific, technically they're called collocations, but that's a very fancy word. And a collocation is when two words go together. not really for any reason other than that's just how we do it. So for example, you're never gonna have a glass of coffee. That just sounds weird and wrong. You can put coffee into a glass, but if it's coffee, it becomes a cup. You're gonna have a cup of coffee and a glass of water. A cup of water sounds like something you're going to bake with or use to cook with, but not to drink. If you ask somebody, hey, can I have a cup? And you put water in it, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. It's specifically when you say, hey, can I have a cup of water? That doesn't sound like a cup to drink out of. It sounds like a cup to cook with for some reason. But if you say, oh, hey, can I have a glass of water? That sounds like you're going to drink the water, not cook with it, which is an interesting collocation. So glasses are used for lots of different liquids. I would guess that it's more common to say glass than it is to say cup for like standard drinking liquids like juice, water, kombucha. What other drinks are there? I don't really drink anything other than water and like a beer, so I don't really know. What else, what other drinks, whatever drinks there are, you know what I mean. So yeah, I feel like there's more drinks out there in the world. Soda, soda's a drink. You can have a, that'd probably be have a soda, have a glass of soda, have a glass of Coke. Yeah, I guess that works. So you wouldn't really say a cup of soda. Because again, that sounds sort of like you're cooking with it. I don't know, weird. English is weird. And glasses can be in tons of different shapes and sizes. I know that I've had tons of different glasses that I've liked over the years, like for drinking out of. Maybe this is weird, but I'm somebody that appreciates a nice drinking glass because I use them frequently. I drink a lot of water, and so I like to have a nice glass. Growing up, I didn't want to wash water glasses every single day because that's just ridiculous. It's water. And if you're the same person that uses it, you don't need to wash your water glass. And so my family each had a different style of glass that we would use for just us. And so I have fond memories of my specific water glass that I would drink out of and that was always my water glass and I could fill it up, I could drink out of it and it was a really nice big one. I could fit a lot of water in there and that was really nice because I like water. especially the water from my home city, because it tastes very good. I don't really know how to describe it, but I like tasty water. I, in fact, can taste the difference between lots of different waters that a lot of people don't care about. They're like, it's water, who cares? And I go, I care. I care about the taste of water. Okay, I'm talking about something totally separate from glasses, but that's how this podcast goes sometimes. I was saying there's all sorts of different sizes of glasses and something that's interesting about glasses is that they're going to change over your life. Glasses don't last forever because eventually they break or they get lost or you move or something happens to them. and the glasses can stick around for a long time but eventually they're going to be forgotten or replaced or something like that and so I like to appreciate the glasses that I do have for the time that I have them and then move on and sort of it's treated as like a little bit of a different uh era or time in my life, which is probably pretty weird. I'm probably pretty weird for feeling like that, but you know, uh, that's where we're at. So anyways, this is my episode on glasses down in the comments. Let me know. Do you wear glasses and what kind of glasses do you like to drink out of? I'm very curious to know, and I will see you again tomorrow for another episode of Ben's language lab. No, yeah. A daily dose of English. I don't know what it's called. Jeez. I know my own channel name. Anyways, I'll see you then. Bye!
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