How are you? Hoje, no podcast, eu falo sobre expressões com a palavra ODD. Não perca!!


Transcrição
How are you doing? You're listening to the new episode of the Inglês Online podcast. Thank you for telling everyone you know about this podcast and, enjoy!

How about we take a quick look at the word odd? O-D-D, odd. One of the most common meanings of odd is... strange. Unusual, peculiar, strange, all of that. Now, I hear the word odd with that meaning way more frequently in British English than American English, so. For example, you may hear "What an odd coincidence!" or someone you know may be a bit blunt all of a sudden and say "You look odd in that jacket".

Or something very unexpected happens, that you think was really not supposed to happen, and you say... "That's odd. I left the bike inside the apartment. How come it's outside now?"... or "Look! A racoon! That's odd. I've lived here for twenty years and it's the first time I've seen a racoon." It this was the US, I would probably hear "strange" or "weird" rather than "odd".

So I've talked about the word odds before, in the idiom "What are the odds?" Here's another term with the same word: the odds are in your favour. You can understand odds, O-D-D-S, as chances or probability. So when someone says "I think your plan will be successful. The odds are in your favour!", they're saying it is likely that things will go your way. Likewise, if someone says the odds are against you, they think you're going to face some challenges and the probability of your success doesn't look very high.

So if you have to drive in the São Paulo traffic at rush hour for the first time, without a map or GPS, and you have one hour to get from a neighbourhood in the northern part of town to a neighbourhood in the southern part of town... The odds are against you. What if you have twenty minutes to buy five different kinds of fruit, and you're taken to a supermarket and left there? I'd say the odds are in your favour.

And now, you have to complete a school assignment over the weekend and you're afraid that you're going to be so distracted by browsing the Internet that you're not going to get anything accomplished. Well, you're in luck because due to a technical glitch in the service provider, you'll have no Internet access over the weekend. The odds are in your favour now!

And, finally, let's say you have to find a particular John Smith who lives in... Canada. And, you know, you have five days to find him. That's all the information you have: his name is John Smith and he lives in Canada. You don't even know where in Canada he lives. And you've got five days. I would say the odds are against you on that one.

Of course, it's always nice when the odds are against you and you go ahead and accomplish whatever it is that you wanted to accomplish anyway. Has that ever happened to you? Please tell me your story in the comments! Talk to you next time.

Key expressions

odd
the odds are in your favour
the odds are against you

Vocabulary

likewise = da mesma maneira