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love is in the air everywhere i look [Music] whether you're searching for your soulmate or just in love with life we'll cover the common customs associated with this heartwarming holiday calling all lovebirds we're going to unwrap the unconventional institution known as valentine's day on today's f y i welcome to for your info english you got it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello hello hello amigos and welcome to another exciting edition of fyi for your english
the show where we look at a bunch of different topics and we learn so much english every week remember in each episode there are over 300 vocabulary words expressions and structures therein therein means so guys remember if you want to make the most of it i highly recommend you check out my patreon it's patreon.com alberto alonso and there you can get bonus content you can also get access to worksheets and pdfs with all the vocabulary and if you're in the higher levels you
can even get a weekly review class with me and a monthly master class so if you want more information about that go over to patreon.com alberto alonso and you'll find out more speaking of i'd like to send a shout out to all my patrons including my super duper students hugo roberto jose maria mila deside alex fatricio edgar lolas and don't forget about my interstellar students carmen pilar diana and diego thank you so much to all of you for making this possible
again if you guys want some additional information or just want some free samples contact me on social media i'd be more than happy to oblige all right well let's get into this week's episode happy valentine's day to all of you now remember this is really important here this is probably one of the most important things we're going to look at today v versus b i always tell my students the v vibrates your teeth should touch your bottom lip and they should vibrate the v vibrates
so if you say valentine's day you're talking about february 14th but if you say valentine's day then you're talking about a registered trademark a whiskey so be careful guys ballentines is a whiskey and valentine's is today you call it san valentin we call it valentine's day we don't say the saint part so i've heard a lot of my students say happy saint valentine's it would be more common to say happy valentine's day so let's take a look at the intro i started with that classic song
that you all know the first line of but nobody knows the second or third line so i'll start it love is in the air did you just say what you watch you what you are i know i know i know you were tempted even if you didn't do it but there are lyrics and the lyrics actually make sense so let's take a look at them really quickly so you never have to say what you watch you again so the song goes like this love is in the air everywhere i look around so to look around great phrasal verb to know
then he says again love is in the air every side and every sound every sight and every sound and i don't know if i'm being foolish no siendo tonto i don't know if i'm being wise no siendo and you know what it reminds me now that we're at it another song that has to do with love and it's perhaps uh one of the most quintessential love songs out there elvis's wise men say [Music] right and that's why i just thought of that because in this song they talk about being foolish
and being wise as well so you'll see a lot of different similarities between the different love songs so as i just said foolish and wise you'll see falling in love breaking my heart so you'll see a lot of patterns and we're going to take a look at some really cool love songs in the second part of today's show then i said whether you're searching for your soul mate now weather is tiempo but whether it's c as well it's another way of saying if whether you're searching for your soul mate
now your soul mate is to compagnero de alma i think you guys translate it as media so whether you're searching for your soul mate or just in love with life or estas we'll cover kubrid the common customs there's my alliteration the common customs associated with this heart warming holiday now the word heartwarming what is this algo que calienta el corazon literally heartwarming well in spanish i think you guys say reconfortante right it's it's moving right commodore another way to say is
moving so a heartwarming holiday then i said calling all lovebirds los amantes now a love bird is a way we call uh tortolitos i think you say in spanish it's a way of saying lovers right oh you too love birds tortolitos but it really is a kind of bird periquito is a love bird then i said we're going to unwrap this we're going to unwrap the unconventional institution known as valentine's day that's right unconventional poco convention and obviously an institution is una institution
so are you guys ready now i'd use the word unwrap on purpose because it's a time when people give and receive gifts but you know before we get started before we get any deeper into the episode i want to say valentine's day is not always a great holiday for everybody you know especially if you're single you're thinking well maybe you know it's not the best holiday but in general holidays can remind us of uh you know the fact that we're surrounded by people we love and they can also remind us on
how alone we can be at times too so i always say this too on valentine's day if you have a partner now be careful with this word i've heard students say my couple no no no the couple is both of you uh partners each of you individually so my wife is my partner and we are a couple so i always try and reach out contact i always try and reach out to my friends who aren't in a relationship who are single just to let them know i love them too because it's not only about romantic
love i think you can love everything as i said in the beginning you can love life you can love your pet you can love ice cream why not now there is an alternate holiday and it's called galentine's day i don't know if you've heard of it gal is another way to say girl so galentine's day and it's celebrated on february 13th the day before valentine's day and it's a made-up holiday well wait a second valentine's day was a made-up holiday too in fact what i've realized as i've
researched different holidays thanksgiving christmas they were all pagan and well we kind of borrowed them tomar prestado and we gave them a new name and you know cleaned them up a little bit made them more christian so if you want to get down to the brass tacks lobasicolo holidays were made up at one point made up as inventados so this galentine's day is a day for celebrating the love you have for you and your lady friends whether they're single or not it's not about being single or being
in a relationship it's about spreading love and in fact these kind of holidays uh these you guys i think call them cortes holidays these kind of pre-fabricated pre-made holidays we call them hallmark holidays and there's a reason because the most famous brand of cards target cartas you know the things you send in the mail saying happy birthday well the the most famous brand in the united states is hallmark so a lot of times we call it a hallmark holiday meaning it was designed by corporations
for people to consume to spend money but i always say hey if you're going to make somebody smile if you're going to cheer somebody up animale well then maybe it's worth it to spend a little money and get them some flowers not just on valentine's day any day and the word hallmark by the way it means seiyo distintivo right so it kind of makes sense that this company would call themself hallmark now i have to be honest i don't remember the last time i used snail mail snail mail es lo que yo mamos e
correo ordinario but i've got to say there's nothing like getting something in the mail that's not a bill que no se una factura or somebody telling you that you owe them money it's so nice to get even a postcard hey if you guys want my address i'll give it to you anyway on this day or this during this period i should say over 114 million cards are sent out that's just on you know the 13th the 14th that week 114 million cards so yeah that's a lot of stamps over there and in the intro we talked
about lovebirds and yeah that's what we call two people who are in love and you know they just see that they're all uh looking at each other with puppy dog eyes como de well lovebirds aren't the only birds associated with this holiday in fact doves you know this word if you use dove soap el jabon no el logo tipo is so obviously it's called dove and doves are associated with peace and love right but in general birds have been related to this holiday since a man named jeffrey chausa
the famous poet and writer jeffrey chaucer in the 14th century he first made this connection between birds and love and that was the end-all be-all aiya from now on we say lovebirds we associate them with doves and it's all because of chaucer whose fault is it it's jeffrey chauser's fault and he said and i quote on saint valentine's day every bird cometh to choose his mate now cometh is an antiquated way a biblical way almost of saying come so every bird comes to choose
his mate and it's very interesting i wanted to look at this word mate as well now if you're british your mate is tu colega but if you're american your mate is your pareja to mate is so be careful in the united states my wife is my mate my the rest of them are my buddies or my pals uh forma de ed colega so that word has a different meaning depending if you're in the united states or in england but those symbols those bird symbols those are universal thank you jeffrey chaucer
and i think it might have something to do with the fact that birds are very faithful son leales you know they they usually find one mate and they stick with that mate for life now not all birds not all species of birds but in general birds are not uh polygamous they are monogamous again i'm generalizing and i'm not an expert on birds but i will tell you that uh after researching this i realized that that was one of the connections that jeffrey chaucer drew so we all know it's celebrated on
february 14th and guys if you haven't practiced your months let's do that right now i want you guys to repeat after me to make sure you're pronouncing the months correctly also remember that when we write the months we capitalize them so let's start at the beginning january repeat after me guys february march april may june july august september october november december be careful i know there are a few that are more difficult than other ones such as february
january but as always practice makes perfect as i told you guys before anytime you hear new vocabulary or something that sounds a bit strange to you your best bet would be to repeat it aloud well the reason it's celebrated on february 14th is because it's the feast of saint valentine who was a catholic saint who was executed that's right executed you heard me correctly by roman emperor claudius second right emperador we say emperor unimperio is an empire so uh on that date
uh sometime during the third the third century i was going to say the 13th century but it was way before that the third century uh claudius ii was executed now there are many legends around why he was executed some people say that it had to do with the marriage laws but i think it's ironic that we celebrate you know a lovey-dovey holiday around a guy who was beheaded now to be beheaded means they they chop off your head and whatever the reason may have been well wow he became a martyr
you guys say martir we say martyr this saint valentine so as with many stories from the past there are a lot of different legends and well since nobody from that period is still alive nobody can corroborate our story so we'll stick with the one we like best i say choose the one you like best and stick with it now another explanation was when saint valentine was in prison he prayed to praise the third oraciones with the daughter of one of his judges and he cured her blindness
and well after uh well before his execution he can't do it after his execution before his execution he wrote her a letter and it said from your valentine and that was the first time that it was written because in english we say be my valentine so obviously i'll ask my wife to be my valentine will you be my valentine like on those little candy hearts which by the way i think they're disgusting as querozos they taste like chalk tita did you know that from your valentine it was his original words
and he signed it from your valentine and that you'll see all the time now when somebody gives you a gift they'll say from your valentine or signed your valentine so despite going against the laws back then or the emperor which as you know you couldn't go against the emperor the penalty was death well he at least cured someone but what i think is kind of funny he cured her blindness but then later we say love is blind so hmm okay i was trying to be funny it wasn't that funny [Music]
all right so let's take a look at the roots as i said before it's like many many holidays that we've talked about on this program by the way if you want to check out those app uh those episodes they're on apple itunes or what is it called apple podcasts now ivox spotify podimo i mean we're on a lot of different platforms and if we're not let me know because we will be there but if you remember in the thanksgiving episode and the christmas episode we said that a
lot of those holidays were originally pagan holidays which were later turned into christian holidays and so this one was based on or it was kind of created to overshadow protagonism to overshadow the pagan festival of lupercalia lupercalia which was celebrated between the 13th and the 15th now do you know how they the romans celebrated this holiday by sacrificing a goat and a dog and then whipping women now whip is como latigato whipping women with their hides now you can say their skin or their
hides suspieles sounds really romantic huh that sounds disgusting man well why did they do this why did they sacrifice goats and dogs and then use their hides to whip women it doesn't make sense well they believe that this made women more fertile and there were lines they supposedly according to historians there were lines aviacolas of women lining up boniendo cincola to get slapped with these bloody goat and dog hides no thanks i'll pass well i'm not a woman but even if it was available to me
i would definitely pass but it wasn't until the fifth century that pope julius i i don't know how to pronounce that name please forgive me pope gelasius the first outlawed now to outlaws to make something illegal he outlawed lupercalia this holiday and he officially declared february 14th as valentine's day so wow what a dark weird past and speaking of dark sides we're going to take a look at the dark side of valentine's day in the bonus part of today's show
that and much more so let's talk about some of the common gifts that people give their valentines now there's nothing more classic than that heart-shaped box of chocolate you guys know the one i'm talking about it is a staple uh on valentine's day you can't have balanced valentine's day without a heart-shaped box and uh it reminds me a little bit of uh forrest gump my mama always said life was like a box of chocolates you never know what you're gonna get and i want you to okay
we might not be able to learn too much from forrest gump but we can we can learn the proper pronunciation of chocolate so many students say chocolate or chocolate it's two syllables chocolate chocolate and uh and this shape this heart shape i was curious about this because we've all seen a human heart and a human heart just doesn't look anything like that heart that the chocolate comes in or that heart that we draw on our notebook so what happened there when did this
thing with all these ventricles and kind of an ugly looking thing let's be honest when you take a look at a human heart it's not pretty noise bonito well this supposedly this is fascinating uh it resembles a now extinct plant a plant called silphium and this plant uh was shaped like what we shape a heart now you know i'm not talking about the real heart now i'm talking about the heart shape that we've created and that was based on a plant called silphium and this was a plant that was found in
africa it was used for food coloring it was also used as a cough syrup harabedettos and most notably a contraceptive so that's interesting i didn't know where we got that heart shape because anybody it doesn't take a genius you can take a look at what a human heart looks like and then you can look at that little i love new york and say wait i don't get it it doesn't look the same at all so it's some say based on that flower now there are other people who say that the shape is a
representation of the human body of the breasts no you don't have to use too much imagination to see breasts there pechos buttocks a butt or a bottom and the cheeks right the cheeks it's funny how in english we call them butt cheeks your cheeks so yeah there are some people who say yeah flower shmower i think it has to do with sexual organs hey you guys be the judge do your research and come up with your own opinion now we couldn't talk about this holiday without talking about flowers now we
already mentioned flowers because that's where we got the inspiration for our heart but uh i'm talking about the flowers you give somebody and this comes back it dates back to the victorian era where people express their emotions through something and i had no idea this existed floriography the language of flowers so this is imagine i i never knew about this i'm learning so much myself in this episode that if you wanted to give somebody a special message well each flower conveyed or
transmitted a different message so depending on what flower you gave them and i guess that's normal nowadays too because we associate red roses with valentine's day and red roses have always been associated with romance the same way other flowers are associated with funerals and death so i didn't know there was a name for it i knew that flowers each had a different symbolism but it's called floriography so this red roses thing this goes back to the victorian era it's nothing new
and speaking of red man i saw red no that's not true but i wanted to teach you that expression to see red is to become infuriated i think of the the cartoons i saw red but no i don't think i've ever gotten too angry i don't think i've ever seen red on valentine's day but i have seen the color red but as well as all the other questions my curiosity got the best of me and i said why why red okay i'm curious why didn't we choose pink or blue or green scientists have
confirmed that this was a study that was done at the university of rochester and scientists psychologists found that men viewed women who were wearing red or standing in front of a red background so you don't even need to wear red they found them significantly more attractive and sexual sexually desirable than women who were wearing a different color then they did the study with men looking at women excuse me women looking at men vice versa right they flipped the study and they found that
it produced the same effect so you guys want to be more attractive wear red not just on valentine's day it's scientifically proven not to mention the color also symbolizes confidence spontaneity and determination and i think those are all three uh very important qualities if you're looking for your soulmate so what's the bottom line quest we're read more often if you want to be more attractive now we said some people like to give flowers some people love to give
chocolates other people like to give an experience and that's more my style i mean i get flowers i get chocolates but i also like the dinner experience i like taking my valentine out to dinner and celebrating our love and i'm going to tell you guys in the bonus part of the show about how i proposed to my wife and it was around thanksgiving it was around valentine's day and well thanks to valentine's day i was able to throw her off this confertile i'll tell you all about that story in the bonus
part of today's show and i can give you a spoiler now she said yes when i proposed to her in paris she said yes but she wasn't expecting it and that's all thanks to valentine's day and we're gonna wrap up the first part of today's show talking about cupid that's right cupido i think you say koopie i never know how to say that in spanish cupid that little heavenly figure uh that uh is the quintessential matchmaker i know you guys say felistina right as a matchmaker a matchmaker is somebody who
sets people up to set somebody up with someone as they feel oh yeah i think you guys would make a good couple i think you guys would make a perfect match that's why we call them match makers in fact we have an expression when two people are great for each other it's a match made in heaven well amigos we've reached the end of this part of today's fyi but in the bonus part of today's show as i said i'm going to tell you the story about how i propose to my wife
we'll also talk about the dark side of valentine's day also i'll tell you where the x and the o came from you know a lot of times when we send a letter or an email or even a text we put show show well it's not show show it's x-o-x-o and we'll look at where that came from we'll also look at some common vocab and idioms that have to do with love and of course we're going to sing some songs too all that and much more in the bonus part of today's fyi [Music] hey baby love you [Music]