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026 - A Story about stories

Hello there, Kevin here with another episode of the Feel Good English podcast. Today is Ted Talk Tuesday, which means I have another lesson for you based on a Ted Talk from ted.com.

This talk is called “The Technology of Storytelling”, it’s a fun, entertaining, short four minute talk and it is by a guy named Joe Sabia, that’s a Portuguese word, “sabia”, interesting.

And he is an iPad storyteller and he introduces us to a man named Lothar Meggendorfer, a German if you couldn’t tell by his name, who created a bold technology for storytelling, the pop up book. Pop up books are those books for children where when you turn a page, something comes out of the page. They make it so pieces of paper, art, pops out of the page, kind of 3-D.

And Joe Sabia shows us how new technology has always helped us tell our own stories. From the walls of caves to his own on-stage iPad. So listen to this episode of the Feel Good English podcast and learn the vocabulary, I’m going to talk about the vocabulary, the expressions that he uses here, talk a little bit about the talk. But the main objective is for you to learn the vocabulary here, then go to ted.com, find this video, watch it, be entertained and see this vocabulary being used.

This is a great fit to learn these new words and expressions and to integrate this new English into your English. Okay? So, let’s get started.

So he starts his talk with “Ladies and gentlemen, gather around.” Often you will hear this expression “gather around”, it means just for people to gather, is to come close, to collect their bodies and come together. To gather is to collect.

“Gather around” is when you want people to come near you cuz you’re going to say something.

Often you will hear this spoken as “gather round”. And here you’ll hear him say “gather round”. We just take off the “around”, it’s a little faster. “Gather round”, “gather around”, so it saves you about half a second. See that?

Then he goes in to talk about the book in 19th century Germany and how the book was the king of storytelling in 19th century Germany. He uses the word “venerable”.

Venerable means it was well-respected, honorable. So the book in 19th century Germany was venerable for storytelling, it was “ubiquitous”. Ubiquitous, a great word ubiquitous.

Ubiquitous means it was everywhere and always see it, you could always find it. Something is ubiquitous.

Let’s say in your city, you always see car accidents, car accidents are all over the place, you always see car accidents every day, you would say “Car accidents in my city are ubiquitous.”

But then he talks about how storytelling through books got a little boring and a guy named Lothar “changed the game” forever. “To change the game” means to invent something that revolutionizes what’s being used as the current system.

So it’s a “game changer”. Ever heard that? Game changer? It means it changes everything from that point into the future, it’s a revolutionary, innovative thing.

Then he goes, at around a minute and thirty seconds, he talks about the evolution of storytelling and how it was all based on Lothar’s pop up book. And he says whether storytellers realized it or not, they were channelling Meggendorfer’s spirit when they removed opera, to vaudeville, radio news to radio theatre, film to film and motion, to film and sound, color 3-D on VHS and on DVD.

“Channeling his spirit”. To channel his spirit means “connecting with his spirit”, to channel something means to be on the same channel, the same wavelength, to connect with somebody through that. So whenever they were progressing storytelling, they were channeling the same spirit that he did when he invented the pop up book.

Remember the pop up book, books with things that come out of the book, pictures that pop out of the book.

Two minutes and three seconds he uses the phrasal verb and he says “ And things got a lot more fun when the Internet came around.” You see the internet is some serious business. To come around is to appear, right, to make an appearance, to come around. So the Internet came around, what, in the late 80s, 90s.

You could use this for a person. “How has having been? He never comes around anymore.” He never “comes around”, I think he got a new girlfriend. No, that’s not true, I am married. But let’s say another Kevin, he got a new girlfriend and he never comes around, he never appears, he never makes an appearance.

Or you say “Hey, hey dude, you should come around more often” or you should come here more often, you should make an appearance more often and come around more often.

And here’s another word for you, maybe you’ll find this in the TOEFL or the IELTS test one day. “Gesticulate”. This comes from the word “gesture” if you look at the first part of the word, gesture. To gesticulate, that’s a hard word to say. So around two minutes and forty 40 seconds “And one man would tell the story to his father by using a platform called Twitter to communicate the excrement his father would gesticulate.” So the “gesticulate” is to make gestures, to use your body to communicate, as opposed to words.

And then right after that at two minutes forty five seconds he says “And after all this everyone paused, they took a step back.” Cool expression to “take a step back”. We need to take a step back. To take a step back is to pause, to reconsider something, to pause so you can look at it again from maybe a more objective view, to look to see what’s going on, to review what’s going on.

So you’re really involved in a project and you’re moving forward and you are doing a lot of work and then you say “Hey guys, let’s step back for a minute and see where we are right now.” So let’s take a moment, let’s pause, see where we are so we can review and see if things are going the way we want them to.

That’s it for this lesson. Cool, fun, short video. It’s great to have short, fun, entertaining English Lessons sometimes, right? So if you want, listen to this a couple times, then read the transcript, if you are a Feel Good member, then go watch the Ted Talk. You have four minutes today to watch that Ted Talk, I know you do. I can see you, you are sitting there right now on the couch with a beer in your hand. Put the beer down, pick up the phone, watch that Ted Talk.

Thanks again for listening to me, thanks for putting me in your ears. I’ll see you in a couple of days with another lesson.

Until then, smile, be happy, stay positive.

And your technology joke for the day:

How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?

Zero, that’s a hardware problem.

And we’ll talk soon.