Are you a chicken or do you eat chicken, hopefully it's the latter, or maybe neither if you're a vegetarian/ vegan. Today we talk about chickening out and some similar expressions.
*** Transcript***
Keiran: Hey, there how is it going guys. Today is Tuesday October the 25th and one of my students just bailed on me. And so I'm gonna record this podcast right now for tomorrow. Hope you're doing well, I'm doing pretty well and today I wanted to talk about chickening out or being a chicken. And a few other words we used to talk about when someone doesn't have the courage to do something which is what we call chickening out. But before I get into that I just want to leave a few thoughts for you to consider. I know some of you guys out there have been using the transcripts for the podcasts, you find it useful to be able to read what I am saying or what any other guests are saying, while we're doing the podcast.
And I started to get a company to write them for me in September and when we did the first one I read it and it was very well done. However just yesterday I checked the transcript they provided for Monday's podcast and it was fuckin' awful. There was even one point in the transcript where what I had said was -- had been marked down as David Peachy saying and David Peachy was saying what I had said. And there's tons of words missing and I spent about 45 minutes correcting it. So if you guys are ever reading these transcripts and you see a lot of mistakes, please, please, please let me know because I get this done for you and if they're doing a poor job at it, I have to go after them.
And they're either gonna shape up or I'm gonna find someone else to do it because this is an English language podcast they can't have tons of mistakes everywhere, right? Alright so that's it about that. Another thing I want to just mention before we get on with chickening out and wussing out and wimping out which we'll get to very shortly is we got podcast number 100 coming up on Saturday. So if you haven't voted on what you want me to do, I would do it quickly. I suggested either I'd drunk dial some of the podcast listeners which means you're gonna have to give me your numbers or I will prank call some of the old podcast guests or lastly I'm gonna call up switchboard operators which are the people who connect you to people of importance inside some major Fortune 500 companies.
So let me know what you wanna do inside the private Facebook group and we will do that and let's get on with the show. So in life we always find ourselves in -- I guess you can say sometimes you stagnate. You feel you're not growing anymore and at the back of your head usually you know what you need to do to move forward. Usually, not always. And a lot of the times what you need to do to move forward is something that is quite uncomfortable. Maybe you have to try to get a foreign client for the first time; maybe you have to present in a foreign language; maybe you have to apply to a new job but you don't do it. You chicken out. You sit there and you wait and you wait and you wait and by chickening out, we mean you lack courage in that moment.
I think everyone has had this experience sometime in their life. I remember the first time that I chickened out was - we used to go to the water slides when we were younger. We would go to the pool that we belonged to and it was all the older kids and we would go with the lifeguards which was so much fun because we kind of looked up to them and they were -- they're like our role models or our friends/teachers at the same time. And at the water slides we always went to there's this huge water slide, which was just a very steep slide, it went almost straight down. And this was kind of like the cool kid water slide, you know like the one you bragged about going on because it was so scary. And I remember the first three times we went there, I went with my friends and then you walked up this huge tower, all these stairs as we get to the top.
And then I just stood there, and I just saw people going down and I completely chickened out. There's no way I was gonna do that. It was way too scary for me, right? Now chickening out is a general word, you can use it for anyone and the other word we often hear is wussing out, wussing out. That comes from the word or the noun wuss. And a wuss is kind of like a mean word we use to describe a man or a boy who has no courage. So that's a bit of a gendered word. It's oriented more towards men. So in that scenario, I could say I wussed out. I could say, I wasn't as masculine as I could have been in that moment. And then the other one we also use is wimp out. Actually no, sorry not wimp out. Pussy out. He pussied out of it.
This one is a very sensitive word too and you might get in trouble for using it in North America at the moment because, I mean pussy has a lot of different meanings associated with it. One of them is a pussy cat, a small kitten. Second one could be, it's a vulgar word for the word, vagina. So when you say pussy out of something, it means we're kind of mocking women in a sense. We're saying, oh women are not strong and you're acting like a woman, so you pussied out. So we don't really use this one that often unless you're with a group of guys and they're making fun of each other. So I would go with chicken out if you ever wanna use a different way of saying I'm scared of doing something. You say, "I chickened out of it".
So what have you chickened out of, think of that. Maybe you can even put it in the comments below. And maybe you don't want to but hey why not, it's fun too have little courage and you know be open and be honest, make yourself vulnerable, that's always an uncomfortable thing to do but at the end of the day if you respect yourself, isn't that all that matters? So I'm curious what did you ever chicken out of. Actually I haven't really chickened out of very much recently. The last year I think I've done all the things I wanted to do. I started a podcast. I started my own comedy show. I'm building the website and I'm gonna be continuing to do that.
I have a few audio books or programs that I'm actually in the beginning stages of making which I think are gonna be exciting to any language learner out there who is sick of all the routine stuff that they're constantly being tried to baaah! my language is falling apart. You know you're sick of all the normal language learning products out there. I think mine is gonna be more fun because I'm more fun than them, they're boring. They're very boring so why would you wanna buy a boring product, right? I'm not gonna talk about that anymore.
So guys that's about it for today. We talked about chickening out, wussing out, pussying out of something. And I want you guys to think about that for a moment. What have you ever chickened out of, what have you've ever wussed out of, or what have you ever pussied out of? And let us know, you know. Participate, grow your language, listen to this a few times, make sure you understand the podcast fully. Take notes if there's any other expressions in there that you liked. And we'll catch you next time on the next podcast of UnCensored English.