Expressões com a palavra FORCE

So I'm back with a new full English-written post. I always miss those posts. Once I got an e-mail of a reader saying I should write more posts in English. I told her I would, but Portuguese keeps my blog more accessible to students of all levels. But without further ado, let's dive right into the expressions with the word force.

I don't even need to tell you what force means if you're a Portuguese speaker. It does pretty much sound and look like our own word, força. So, to start off, we have the following expression: a tour de force. You might be finding this weird because it doesn't sound like English, does it? It is actually a french sentence, but also used very commonly by native English speakers. You know how much we like to exchange vocabulary with other languages. It's not different for English. So, a tour de force means a performance or achievement which shows a lot of skill and which is admired by a lot of people. So imagine you are an actor and you play a very important person in theater and everybody loves your performance. They tell you it was a brilliant tour de force. It's important to notice that this expression is more commonly used with things related to artists, music, theater, cinema, books and everything else related to culture.

Our second expression is very intuitive. Take a look: by force of habit. If we tried to translate it directly into our language word by word, we wouldn't be frustrated. We say it the same way: por força do hábito. So all we have to do now is show how this expression would apply in a real situation. Imagine you've been working your entire life, but now that you've reached a certain age, you're retired. The thing is, your old job required you to wake up very early in the morning, and even now that you don't have to wake up early anymore, by force of habit you're up at 5 a.m. every day. That's because when you do something by force of habit, you have a tendency to do it because it has become a habit. Pretty simple, huh? Let's move on to our third and last expression with the word FORCE.

This one is the simplest. Imagine for whatever reason there's a celebrity in jail and all his fans are out in force to support him. Again: they're all OUT IN FORCE to support him. When you say something like that, what you mean is that people are present in large numbers. That celebrity was probably very famous and had a large number of fans. They gathered in front of the jail with posters and everything to try to get him out of there. I hope this helps. Talk to you next time!