Take it down a notch, top-notch [expressions with the word NOTCH]

I have some expressions with the word NOTCH that hopefully you'll never forget. On dictionary.com, notch means "an angular or V  -shaped cut, indentation, or slit in an object, surface, or edge", but that's the literal meaning of the word and it won't play such important role in our expressions after all.

The first expression with the word notch I learned was actually an adjective, "top-notch". I was talking to some random girl on internet in English and she said she had a top-notch upbringing. She was actually showing off some of the trips, schools she'd been to and was trying to say her upbring was the absolute best. That's what top-notch means: the absolute best. You can use it to pretty much anything you jugde as something really really good. You can say: Julie's singing in the musical is top notch. You can say both top notch and top-notch.

Now suppose you were talking to that girl I just talked about. You think she's acting too arrogant and you want to make it stop, so you say: bring it down a notch. No one cares! You say bring it down a notch when you want someone to regulate his or her level of enthusiasm. In portuguese, it's almost like saying "vai com calma aí", it could also be another way of saying "calm down" in English. Another example: you're hanging out with one of your friends when he makes some comment about how pretty your sister is. So you say: take it down a notch. That's my sister you're talking about.

Our next expression is used to describe the quality of things, but only when you want to compare something to something else; when you wanna say something is not quite as good as something else. For example, you and your friend are talking about music. You believe your friend's favorite band is okay but not as good as yours. So you say: Your favorite band's really good, but it's a notch below mine. That expression is used to describe things that are in the same level of quality, but for some reason one is better than the other.