Today we're going to work on idioms with the word "hand".
Well, let's do idioms first, make sure we got that down.
Well, "handy" means or equals "available".
Now, that's the key, it's available now.
If you have something handy, you have it available now, or it also means useful, full of use.
If I tell you something is, that's rather handy, that cell phone that has all those
Or if I say, I don't have any money handy right now, I don't have anything I can get
And because I can't get my hands on it, it's not handy.
There's not a phone handy right now, I can't call anybody, or there's a marker that's
Okay?
I think I explained before, these two are right here, but the hand, the human hand,
the, okay, actually let me change that, we use it a lot, oops, a lot, sorry, we use a
lot, it's, we say dexterous, but you don't need to know what that means, it's actually
We use it a lot, we use it to create, we use it to destroy things, okay?
We use it for many different things, okay, and these are little things, build houses,
teach, do opera, conduct, okay?
So now we know what we use hands for, what the hand is, you know, it's on your body,
part of your body, let's look at something else.
You know I love Ezekiel, here he is right now.
Every one of my videos should have Ezekiel somewhere in it, okay?
Ezekiel, okay, let me just change this a little bit, had, had a hand in it.
What does that mean, Ezekiel had a hand in it?
Well, if you have a hand in it, it means to have a hand in something, okay, to be, whoops,
P, be part of doing something.
So when somebody has a hand in doing it, has or had, they were part of it, they were part
of doing it, okay, or they were part of the situation, that's to have a hand in it, okay?
Okay, Ezekiel went for a job, but he wanted a special job, he wanted to have experience
on the job, so he said, "I want hands-on experience."
Well, if somebody said Ezekiel wanted hands-on experience, it means he wanted to do it himself.
When you have hands-on experience or you are hands-on in a situation, you did it with your
own hands, okay, so you have direct experience, okay, direct experience, or you're doing it
yourself directly, okay, so that's hands-on.
So if someone's teaching you hands-on, they're there directly, they're not just telling someone
Alright, so we've got that, we've got hands-on.
What about, okay, here's even better, you've got Ezekiel, there's my friend Ezekiel, okay,
let's get out of the way and say, if you don't want somebody to touch something of yours,
Now, hands-off is two things, one means, "Don't touch," but if you're in business and you
say, "I have a hands-off approach," but that means I'm not directly involved, I let them
do their work, but I direct it from the outside, so not directly touching the work, I direct
it from the outside and I have a hands-off approach, okay, so one means, one mean, one
If I'm touching your camera and you go, "Hands-off," I have to take my hand off immediately, don't
The other one, if you have a hands-off approach, it means, number two, a not direct approach
So number one, you're touching your girlfriend's arm, she goes, "Hands-off," don't touch, remove.
Number two, your boss says, "I prefer a hands-off approach," it means that your boss, she would
prefer that people do their work and she's not there directly watching them.
So we've done hands-off, handed it, we've done hands-on, what else could we do?
We did handy, another one with hand, where someone's a handful, if someone's a handful,
it means they are difficult or they keep you really busy.
If you have a little kid, you know, "Wah, wah," a baby, blah, blah, blah, and it runs
away all day, see when Ezekiel was a baby, okay, his mother said he was quite a handful,
he would run all day long, talk all the time, she was always busy, because he made her life
difficult and he made her really busy, he is quite a handful, that job is quite a handful
or something's quite a handful means it makes, it keeps you busy or it's a difficult situation.
Let me see now, is there anything else I can think of with hands?
Actually I've been looking at the hands and the clock, I'm not going to get going, so
unfortunately I've got to get going, but before I go, we did idioms with hands, right, remember
hands are handy, they're useful, okay, we noticed that if someone makes your life too
difficult, right, they're a handful, if you like direct experience with something, you
want hands-on experience, if you don't want someone to touch it or you like to do things
a little bit away, a little distance from it, you say hands-off, do we do anything else?
No?
So www.engvid.com is where I want you to go if you want to learn about anything more,
or if you have any other questions, because I've got a lot of other expressions that are
kind of handy, but I just don't have the time right now.
Go to www.engvid.com, as in English, vid, and it's video, but that's not going to tell
No.
Why?
Go to www.engvid.com, where we'll teach you vocabulary, grammar, vocabulary, grammar,
I don't know, idioms, phrasal verbs, am I driving you crazy?