Expressões com a palavra GEAR

Have you ever heard of the word gear before? If not, let's learn its meaning first and only then we'll be talking about the expressions. If you can drive a car, you're pretty much used to that word in your language. In Portuguese, that word means, among many other things, marcha. So if you want to say, for example, dar marcha ré in English, "to engage reverse gear" is the correct way. The same logic applies to the other gears, like to engage the first gear, the second gear and so on and so forth. We could go over many other combinations with the word gear in its literal meaning, but this post aims at bringing you some new expressions with it. So without further ado, let's learn them!

I was watching an american talk show one day and after a long time discussing a single topic, the host was desperate to move on to a different topic, so she said: Let's shift gears now and talk about something else. But what does she mean by shift gears? You usually say that when you suddenly change what you're doing or what you're talking about. Imagine yourself hanging out with a friend of yours in your place. You guys have been listening to rock and roll all day long and then you feel like shifting gears and listening to blues. As you must have figured, shifting gears is nothing but a break from what you've been doing in a little while. That expression is based on the idea that a vehicle will change speed when you change gears.

Now suppose you're one of those people who need a little time every morning to make yourself start thinking clearly and effectively. Better yet, suppose you spent the whole night out partying and drinking a lot and now are having the world's worst hangover. The problem is that you just got a call from your boss telling you about this last-minute meeting you're supposed to attend in less than an hour. He tells you over the phone: if you don't get your arse in gear you'll be late for this meeting. Bot wait, what does that mean? If you try to get your arse in gear, you force yourself to start working or to hurry. There are actually many ways to say that. If you're having a hard time trying to stay focused, you might be told to get your brain into gears or simply get into gears. If you're in the middle of your day struggling to keep yourself awake and then you take some coffee that finally wakes you up, you can say after drinking coffee you've swung into high gear. That means you've begun operating at a fast pace and increased the rate of activity. That's it for today guys. Take care!