Mar 26, 2018
A Phrasal Verb a Day #58 - to hand out
TRANSCRIPT
Hi everyone. Here’s another phrasal verb for you.
And this one is “to hand out”. “Hand something out” or “Hand out
something”.
Okay. “Hand out”. Like a hand that you use to hold things with, you know the hand – four fingers and a thumb? Right.
“Hand out”. Right. A number of different meanings.
First of all it means to give things to different people in a group. Okay.
“To hand out some papers”, for example, “to hand out some drinks”. Okay.
At the beginning of the meeting Paul was handing out some drinks, Jeff was sitting down eating biscuits and so I said to everyone, “okay just take a seat. I do have some copies of the agenda which I’d like to just hand out to you. In fact, Jeff could you just hand out these papers for me. That’s it. Paul is here handing out the drinks if you’d like one.” Let’s see. Okay.
Another thing is to give something such as advice or information. So not only you can hand out physical things. You can also hand out advice or info (information).
“They wouldn’t hand out your phone number without permission.”, for example.
“Don’t hand out your bank details in the street.” Okay.
“The problem with criticism is that the people who handed out are often not very good at taking it. Have you noticed?”
There you go. Alright. I’m going to trying to be sensible. Alright. Be sensible Luke. Okay.
Third one, third one, which is often passive is to say officially that someone should receive a particular punishment. Okay. It means that someone should be given a punishment.
“Harsher punishments are now being handed out for reckless driving!” Okay.
” A three month sentence was handed out to a teenage boy for making hoax bomb telephone calls.”
Okay. Do you understand that? A hoax bomb telephone call is like a bomb scare. He was given a three month sentence. A three month sentence was handed out to him. Okay.
Okay. We also have the noun and that is a “handout”.
“handout”
So that can be a piece of paper like a worksheet which is given to
people, in fact a worksheet which is handed out to people. That’s
very common in English lessons, isn’t it? If you’ve ever been to an
English school you’ve probably heard your teacher saying that.
Like,
“I’ve got a few handouts for everybody.” Or, you know, “Don’t worry.
This is written on a handout. I’ll be given that to you at the end of the class.” Okay?
“Are there any handouts for this?”, you might say, yeah.
“So yeah, I’ve got some handouts here. I’m just going to hand them out to you in just a second.”
So it means physical pieces of the paper that you give out in a meeting or a lesson or something in a workshop.
It could be money, though, as well particularly when we are talking about government welfare or benefits. Okay. Like, money which is given to people who need it. You know, like for the homeless.
You know, you might hear, sort of, a taxi driver in London complaining about this.
“All these, all these, all these benefits scroungers, you know, they don’t do any work and they just expect handouts from the government.” Okay.
“To expect handouts from the government” meaning that they expect the government to give them things, just give them money, to give them a handout. Alright.
A benefits scrounger – that’s someone who just takes handouts from the government. They don’t work hard. They just scrounge. They just take money in the form of welfare payments.
“He’s forty years old and he’s still living on handouts from his parents.”, for example.
Alright. That’s it for this one. To hand something out like piece of paper, to hand out some advice, hand out criticism, a government handout or to live off handouts from your parents. I’ve got a few handouts.
By the way, ladies and gents this is all on a handout which I will hand out to you later on in the lesson.
Obviously that’s not true because this isn’t a lesson.
This is just your headphones or your speaker, isn’t it? Yes. Alright then.
That’s it for this one. Speak to you again soon. Goodbye.
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