Learn Australian English in this Expression episode of the Aussie English Podcast where I teach you to use the expression TWIST SOMEONE’S ARM!

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Most of us know that a bushfire can be sparked by lightning from a thunderstorm, but did you know that a thunderstorm can be created by a bushfire? I'm not a pyromaniac myself, even though I do like fire, but there are some clouds that are and when they form, they get such incredible powers that they can destroy everything in their path. Some of the most extreme bushfires that Australians have endured, like the Black Saturday fires or the Canberra fires, were made significantly worse by the weather that these fires created themselves. In order to get clouds, you need to get air from the surface high up into the atmosphere. So, when you have a bushfire, it can heat the air around it and, if conditions are just right, it can rise up and form a type of cloud called a pyro cumulus. Now, if conditions are perfect, if the fires really intense, if the atmosphere is unstable, that air can get really, really high, like super high. We're talking twelve, fifteen kilometres or more. And on its way up to those great heights, ice can form and you can get violent winds and thunder and lightning. It's all very, very frightening. And when that happens, the cloud evolves into a type of cloud called pyrocumulonimbus.

G'day, guys, and welcome to Aussie English. My objective here is to teach you guys the English spoken Down Under. So, whether you want to speak like a fair dinkum Aussie or you just want to understand what the flipping hell we're on about when we're having a yarn, you've come to the right place. So, sit back, grab a cuppa and enjoy Aussie English.

Alrighty, you mob. Welcome back to Aussie English, an expression episode today, it is 2020 and this is the very first expression episode, guys. It is a pleasure to have you here.

Sorry for sort of taking a bit of time off over Christmas and not creating any expression episodes for the last, probably, two or three weeks. They require a bit more attention, I guess, a bit more planning, a bit more work, and so they're a little harder to do when you're trying to sort of take it easy over the Christmas and New Year's period. Anyway, guys, you know, it's 2020. I hope you guys had an amazing Christmas period, holiday period, New Year's period, whatever it is that you guys were doing for the last two weeks. I hope you were taking it easy, kicking back, having a cuppa and working on your Aussie English or at least getting ready to work on your Aussie English in the new year, right?

It's 2020 and this year I hope you all have the New Year's resolution of taking your English to the next level. Now, after saying English to the next level, I hope you guys have seen my new course. I have a free course for you, guys. That is a five day course that you can sign up for for free, 100% for free. Go to www.AussieEnglish.com.au/free-course, ok? There'll be a link in the transcript. I'll include one in the email when I email you guys about this episode, but go and check out that free course. It's a great way to learn how to use my five step method on studying, so that you can get the most possible out of all of the Aussie English resources, but also all of the different English resources that you may be using, whether they're podcasts, books, movies, audio, books, whatever they are, ok?

So, go check out this course by the end of it, after five days, you will have the tools that you need to really study effectively in 2020 and take your English to the next level. Apart from that, guys, if you want to get the transcripts for the podcast, make sure that you join the premium podcast. You can sign up for that at www.aussieenglish.com.au And if you want even more, you want the content, the the courses that go with the expression episodes, the Australian history and culture courses, all of the other dialogues that I create, all of that stuff that's in the academy, go and sign up to the academy, there's no better time than the start of a new year where you guys are motivated. You're working hard and you can get in there and really level up your English quickly, especially in the context of Australia.

Anyway, spiel aside, guys, welcome to today's episode. In the very start there in that intro video, that was a video again from ABC News on YouTube. Absolutely love this channel, it's a great place to check out if you want to learn about Australian current affairs, history, culture, all that sort of stuff, there's always new videos coming up on that channel, but in this video, Nate, who is the weatherman on ABC News Channel, is giving a video talking about how bushfires can create their very own weather systems.

So, as you guys may or may not be aware, I'm sure most of you are aware, at the moment in Australia we are experiencing some of the worst bushfires on record. And you will have seen if you've been watching the news, a lot of these freak weather events have been taking place. Things like fire, tornadoes and, you know, fire, thunderstorms, dry lightning strikes, all sorts of stuff like that. So, it's a great video to go check out if you want to know how that happens, how it takes place. And I'm also going to talk about that in the Aussie English fact at the end of today's episode.

So, you mob, welcome to this episode. Today we're going to be covering the expression 'to twist someone's arm'. 'To twist someone's arm'. I wonder if you guys have ever heard this expression before in English? 'To twist someone's arm'. But before we get into that, I thought I would tell you an Aussie joke, right? Well, it' s not specifically Australian. It's a joke, but it's related to arms, ok? So, here's the joke.

Why did the octopus beat the shark in a fight? Why did the octopus beat the shark in a fight?

Because the octopus was well armed.

Did you get it?

Because the octopus was well armed.

So, the pun here is on the word armed octopi, the plural for octopus, octopi. Generally, they should have eight arms each or eight tentacles, but if you say that someone is well armed, it means that they have many weapons, right? Could be knives, guns, batons, whatever it is. They have a lot of weapons, they're well armed. So, that's why the octopus beat the shark in a fight.

So, today's expression is 'to twist someone's arm'. Before we get into it, let's define the words in the expression 'to twist someone's arm'.

So, 'to twist', if you twist something, this is a verb that means to form into a bent curling or distorted shape, right? So, I might twist my hair, I might twist a cord, if I tie a cord in a knot, I'm kind of twisting it, right? I'm forming it into a bent curling or distorted shape.

'An arm'. I'm sure you guys all know what an arm is, right? Every human well, every human is born with two arms, generally, it is each of the upper two limbs of a human body, right? From the shoulder to the hand. That is your arm.

So, let's define the expression 'to twist someone's arm'. If you twist someone's arm, you're pressuring them into doing something that they may not otherwise want to do. So, they may be reluctant to doing that thing, they may not want to do that thing. But you're pressuring them, you're forcing them to do it. So, you're getting someone to do what you want by making it very difficult for him or her to refuse, ok? You're twisting their arms.

So, it's obviously a figurative expression here, although, you could literally twist someone's arm like the police might do when they're apprehending a suspect, so that they can force that suspect to comply, right? They're twisting the arm of the suspect behind his back. So, this phrase originated in the mid nineteen hundreds and it refers to, obviously, using physical force by twisting someone's arm to get something done, but now it's used, generally, figuratively, to say as we said, to pressure someone to do something they don't want to do.

So, as usual, let's go through three different examples of how I might use this expression in day to day life, right? Situations where you could use the expression 'to twist someone's arm'.

Number one. So, imagine you're married and your wife or your husband want to go to an event. You know, maybe they want to go to the footy or they want to go to the ballet. And whether you have absolutely zero interest in either of those things, you don't like footy and ballet is definitely not your cup of tea, right? You're not interested at all, and instead of going to either of those events, you'd much rather chill out at home for the day. Potter around and do your own thing, right? You know, I don't know, play with the dog or read a book, whatever it is.

So, your partner, your significant other, might make a huge fussg and complain that you never do anything that they want to do. You know, every time it's your choice of an event, they always say yes, but when it's their choice, you say no. So, if they use this kind of pressure to convince you to go to the event, the footy or the ballet that they want to do, they're twisting your arm, right? They're getting you to do something that you otherwise wouldn't want to do by pressuring you to do it. They're twisting your arm.

Number two, again, as we went over earlier, I imagine you are a police investigator interviewing a suspect about a possible kidnapping. Someone's gone missing and you're pretty sure that the guy you've got in the interviewing room is the person, the culprit, the suspect. He knows where they are, so you might turn off all the cameras in the room, shut the door and use whatever means possible to get that information out of him.

So, when you come out and tell your colleagues that you know where the kidnapped person is because the suspect spilled his guts, he told you, right? They might ask, 'how did you do it?' And you might say, 'well, ah, I twisted his arm'. And it could be metaphorically that you pressured him, you know, maybe threatened him and said, 'if you don't tell me, if you don't spit out the whereabouts of this person, you're going to end up in jail. You're going to rot in jail for a very long time'. Or it could be a literal twisting of his arm where you used physical force by twisting his arm behind his back until he told you, right? You twisted his arm.

Example number three, this time it's a classic example with my dad. So, over the Christmas holidays, we had a lot of family gatherings and other parties with my folks at their place. Whenever Kel, Noah and I would show up to these parties, my folks would always be downstairs setting things up, right? Getting the barbie on, getting the food ready, making the salads, cleaning up, making space for everyone. So, I'd often go straight to the little bar fridge or car fridge that my dad has where he keeps all of the drinks and I'd get a beer out for myself to start enjoying the festivities and out of politeness, I'd ask him if he wanted one as well.

And Dad usually says in response, 'well, I guess, if you're going to twist my arm, I'll have a beer', right? So, here he's obviously kidding because I'm not putting any pressure on him whatsoever. I'm just asking, did you want a beer? He's being sarcastic, he's being ironic as if I'm forcing him to, you know, I'm manipulating him into having a beer. So, he says, you know, 'well, if you're going to twist my arm, I'll have one', right? So, I'm not really twisting his arm at all, whether literally or figuratively, because he wants the beer anyway, he's just being funny and suggesting that I'm forcing him to have the beer. 'Oh, I guess I'll have one if you're gonna twist my arm'.

So there you go, guys. That is the expression 'to twist someone's arm'. I hope now you understand what it means, right? It is to pressure someone into doing something that they might be reluctant to do, right? You're getting someone to do something by making it very difficult for them to refuse. So, as usual, let's go through a little listen and repeat exercise here, guys, where you can practice your pronunciation, ok? So, listen and repeat after me.

To.

To twist.

To twist someone's.

To twist someone's arm.

Man, there's a lot of little.... sounds going on there in this expression, right? 'To twist someone's arm'. So, I guess I might point out there the little 'twist someone's', we don't really release that T, right? We're not going to say 'twist someone's'. Instead, we kind of lightly touch on that T in the middle of making two sounds, right? So, it's as if we're trying to say one long... sound. And in the middle of it we're making a tiny little T sound that stops the flow of air.

So, you're going to hear 'twist someone's'. 'Twist someone's'. 'Twist someone's'. 'Twist someone's'. It's very subtle there, but that's one of those really advanced pronunciation things that most foreign learners of English never really quite nail. The way that those really complex consonant clusters kind of flow there, right? That STS sound, 'twist someone's'.

So, you have to practice that quite a bit to get used to it. Anyway, let's keep going.

So, now I'm going to go through the phrases 'I twisted her arm'. 'You twisted her arm', but I'm going to flow them together, right? I'm going to use connected speech. So, instead of 'I twisted her arm', you're going to hear 'I twisted her arm', ok? So, try and have a listen to how I'm doing this. You know, I'm using the T flap at the end of the word 'twisted', I'm going to drop the H in front of the word 'her' and I'm going to link that R at the end of the word 'her' to 'arm', ok? So, have a listen and repeat after me.

I twisted her arm.

You twisted her arm.

He twisted her arm.

She twisted her arm.

We twisted her arm.

They twisted her arm.

It twisted her arm.

Good work, guys. Good work. So, that's one of those things in English, you need to pay attention to how sounds change in connected speech, ok? So, just go over these exercises. You know, don't worry too much about nailing it straight away, but it's something you need to practice again and again and again, and eventually, it all solidify itself in your mind. You'll get used to doing it naturally and you won't have to think about it. That's why I put these exercises into these episodes. I know you guys know these simple phrases that I'm saying, I know that you guys can say these words individually, things like 'to twist someone's arm' or 'I twisted her arm'.

The whole point of these exercises is to make you pay attention to connected speech or into how reductions happen, right? So, instead of saying 'to', I'll say 'to' in front of a verb like 'twist', 'to twist'. So, you just have to keep doing this. Pay attention to it, think about it from time to time and work on it and you'll get better from here on out.

Anyway, guys, let's get into the Aussie English fact. I wanted to join this one in to this episode today and I wanted to talk about pyrocumulonimbus clouds, ok? So, at the very start of this episode, Nate was talking about these insane weather systems that are created by fire that are named pyrocumulonimbus, ok?

So, I thought of this because I was thinking, you know, the expression, 'twist your arm', the word 'twist', tornadoes twist. And in this year's bushfire crisis, we've had a lot of these fire tornadoes or what have been nicknamed 'firenadoes', one that tragically flipped a truck and killed a young volunteer firefighter. So, what's going on? Why is it all this weird weather due to these bushfires?

These are caused by pyrocumulonimbus formations or what are also called induced fire thunderstorms. Before we talk about how those formed, though, let's talk about how normal thunderstorms form. And these are called cumulonimbus clouds. 'Cumulus' meaning heaped and 'nimbus' meaning rain or rainstorm. So, on hot days, the surface of the Earth is warmed up by the sun. The sun's rays shine down and warm up the surface of the Earth. The Earth's surface heats up the air just above the surface through a process called conduction and the action of this warm air rising and the cold air sinking, which is known as convection, plays a key role in the formation of severe thunderstorms or cumulonimbus clouds. If the warm surface air is forced to rise, it will continue to rise because it's less dense than the surrounding cooler air. It will transfer heat from the land surface to the upper levels of the atmosphere. Through this process of convection, two of the most important elements of these thunderstorm formations are moisture and instability, right? Unstable air.

These clouds are capable of producing things like lightning, other dangerous severe weather, tornadoes and hailstones. And they can turn into super cell thunderstorms when very strong updrafts are balanced by the downdrafts. This can allow the storm to persist for hours and hours in a super cell, a moist, unstable body of warm air can be caused to rise by an oncoming cold front. The result is a strong, persistent updraft of warm, moist air and the air cools. As it rises, water vapour condenses and forms cumulus clouds, and when condensation occurs, heat/latent heat and energy is released and helps the thunderstorm grow.

At some point, condensation high in the cloud, now in the form of water droplets and ice, falls to the ground as rain and a cold downdraught forms as the rain falls, ok? So, that's how normal cumulus nimbus clouds form and thunderstorms form, but how to the fire induced thunderstorms form the pyro.... See if I get this right. The pyrocumulonimbus formations. So, the process that forms these fire induced thunderstorms or pyrocumulonimbus clouds is analogous to that of the normal thunderstorms. However, instead of the sun's rays heating up the surface of the earth, causing the warm air to rise, which triggers off this formation of a thunderstorm. This time, the heat source, instead of being the sun's rays, is instead a fire or even a volcanic eruption.

This is why you often see massive clouds and plumes of smoke above volcanoes when they're erupting. So, these fire induced thunderstorms usually display considerable vertical development, right? They go up and up and up into the atmosphere and they can reach the upper troposphere and even the lower stratosphere as high up as 20 kilometres in our attitude, like normal thunderstorms.

These pyro cumulonimbus formations can involve precipitation or rain, hail, lightning, wind and even tornadoes. In fact, I was on YouTube just yesterday and I found a really cool video by the slow-mo guys, which I'll link in the transcript, where they actually form a fire tornado by setting up 12 fans in a circle around a steel container with burning kerosene in it and the fire tornado gets to about 10 feet tall. It's insane. So, check out that video.

The combined effects of these phenomena can cause greatly increased fire spread and they can cause direct dangers on the ground in addition to normal fires. In fact, they can spread embers tens of kilometres ahead of the fire front, causing more fires to pop up as the fire moves and as the pyrocumulonimbus clouds develop.

Furthermore, the aerosol of smoke comprising these pyro cumulonimbus clouds can stick around for weeks And with that significantly reduce ground level sunlight in the same manner as the nuclear winter effect.

And you guys may have seen this in places like Canberra and Sydney, as well as the local places that are being affected by these fires. Quite often the smoke is so thick afterwards that even during the middle of the day it looks like night as if the place is covered in fog. That's how dense the smoke is in these areas.

So, of the five most notable pyrocumulonimbus events listed on Wikipedia, the three most recent ones have occurred in Australia. In 1945, we had the Hiroshima firestorm in Japan. In 1991, we had the Pinatubo volcanic thunderstorms in the Philippines. And the three most recent ones were the 2003 Canberra firestorm, where fire induced thunderstorm created a massive fire tornado that was rated F3 on the Fujita scale and killed four people, injuring almost 500 in 2009 on Black Saturday. We also had one of these extreme events happen, this was when 173 people died in the bushfires in Victoria. And this year in 2019, we also had a fire tornado fatality in December where two fire response vehicles were actually overturned by this fire tornado that originated from an active pyrocumulonimbus cloud near Jingellic in New South Wales.

So, there you go, guys. That's a little bit today about how these freak weather events happened because of bushfires. I hope you found it interesting and I hope you'll understand a little bit more about it when they talk about these fire tornadoes or dry lightning or these thunderstorms caused by bushfires on the news.

Anyway, thanks so much for joining me, guys. I hope you got a lot out of this episode and I'll see you next time.

G'day, mate. Thanks for listening to the Aussie English podcast. If you'd like to boost your English whilst also supporting the podcast and allowing me to continue to bring you awesome content, please consider joining the Aussie English Academy at www.aussieenglish.com.au. You'll get unlimited access to the premium podcast as well as all of my advanced English courses, and you'll also be able to join three weekly speaking calls with a real English teacher. Thanks so much, mate, and I'll see you soon.