(Music Playing)
Hi there and welcome to our business question of the week two, my name is Steve and you have come to Privateenglishportal.com.
Our business question this week comes from an advance student of mine and her name is Jasmine and she is from Turkey. Jasmine had studied English grammar for a long time. She studied English grammar for 10 years. She knows English inside and out when it comes to grammar, but she signed up for my classes because recently her company is doing a lot of business with American and British companies. So she has had some communication gap problem.
The question that she asked me in our last class was about Americans using idioms and expressions related to sports in a business setting. And it came up and this is what she asked me. She asked me. Do native speaking business people use an expression that comes from sports? And the two examples that we have are related to expressions using the word BASE. Now if you look on the screen that I am about to pull up here, the picture. You will see that in the baseball. The sports baseball, we have four bases. You can see there first base, second base, third base and home base, right. Now in baseball, when someone touches a base. That means that they are safe. That they have reached there destination and they have done their job correctly. They have made it to that base. That destination and when they touch it, that means that their fine, they are safe, they are secure.
Now that meaning has kind of traveled into American business English and Canadian business. And maybe you British English speakers could be free to email me. I am very curios to know if in our United Kingdom, if we would use that to touch base. Do you guys use that? Email me. Let me know. Anyway TOUCH BASE with some is the expression that we went over. What that means is, is that you are talking about something. You are going to cover that subject. So you will hear in a business setting very common “I’ll touch base with you later today” What does that mean? It means that I will talk about that issue or that subject later today, with you. And “We need to touch base on a few things”. What does that means? When someone comes up to you and they say “Look Charlie, we need to touch base on a few things”. What does that mean? It means we need to talk about a few things. We need to cover all that ground on that subject okay. So that is one expression using BASE, TOUCH BASE.
The second one is when someone is OFF BASE. What does that mean, off base? Before, we were touching the base. Now we are off the base. What that doers that means, is that in baseball. Let us remember, we go back to the sports. We go back to baseball. That when we are off base with something. It means that you are out of the game. That is what it means in business too. That when you are off base with something. It means that you are not correct. You are in exact and the expression that we have here is that “I think your budget calculations are way off base”, are completely off base. What does that mean to be off base? It means that I think your budget calculations are completely inaccurate. They are not accurate. So if you hear someone on the phone and they are from the United States, Canada and they say “I think your budget calculations are way off base”. You might even hear this on the toll phone or the TOEIC or something. What that means is that the calculations. The budget calculations are incorrect. They are not exact.
So those are two expressions related to BASE which comes from which comes from baseball and that was something that came up with my class. With the student who studied English very diligently for 10 years and still needed to take some classes with me to brush up on her business English. So I look forward to your next business question of the week. Next week. Good-bye.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services