English Conversation Training: How to Use Idioms in English

If you’re willing to train yourself you can have your American English accent Dialed In before you know it.

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The other day, I screwed up an idiom. Do you know that phrasal verb? To screw something up means to do it wrong, to make a mistake, to mess up. I screwed up an idiom. I use an idiom that sounds similar but actually has an opposite meaning.

The idioms I’m talking about are ‘phone it in’ and ‘dial it in’ and they’re both great idioms that have taken hold in modern usage. It’s absolutely possible that you’ll come across these idioms in conversations with native speakers, and once you become really comfortable with them, you may find that they are just the perfect phrases to express yourself in English.

Today, we’re going to deep dive with these two idioms. You’re going to know exactly how to use them. And don’t forget, if you like this video, or you learned something, give it a thumbs up and subscribe with notifications. It really does help.

To phone it in and to dial it in. As you know, these days, a phone looks like this: Hello! But it used to look like this, and to call somebody, you had to turn the dial. So we have the phrase to dial a phone number. Now we don’t dial anymore. We press a number or enter a phone number, but we still use the verb ‘dial’. In an emergency, dial 911.

So phone and dial go together in our heads. But the idiom ‘phone it in’ means to do something without really trying, without passion or enthusiasm, just because you have to do it, produce mediocre work.

To ‘dial it in’ is the opposite. It means to pay attention to detail, to be really focused, to produce great work. To phone it in, this idiom comes to us from way back when someone might call into a meeting rather than being there. Now of course, telecommuting is incredibly common now, in this time, to join meetings via Skype or Zoom, but before all this technology was available, showing up in person was very important. So if someone ‘phoned in’ instead of showing up, it showed a lack of enthusiasm and commitment. Phone it in. Let’s look at some real-life examples of people using this idiom.

Show up. Show up and professionalism, reliability, bring everything you got every night. Find a way to get there every night. It’s not okay to phone it in. It’s not okay to kind of sort of do it cause it’s Thursday.

He says it’s not okay to phone it in. He’s talking about theaters here, actors, who may be performing the same role in the same play eight times a week for months in a row. Even if it’s that repetitive, don’t phone it in. Be enthusiastic, committed, and focused. Don’t phone it in. Let’s watch that clip again.

Show up. Show up and professionalism, reliability, bring everything you got every night. Find a way to get there every night. It’s not okay to phone it in. It’s not okay to kind of sort of do it cause it’s Thursday.

Here’s another clip.

And that’s why if I’m writing a good book, it’s not good enough. It’s gotta be great. So I feel a lot of pressure to give you the best book I can at that moment. You know, not to phone it in.

To write a great book, she can’t phone it in. She can’t write without passion or enthusiasm because that would produce a mediocre book. She can’t phone it in if she wants to write a great book. Here’s the clip again.

And that’s why if I’m writing a good book, it’s not good enough. It’s gotta be great. So I feel a lot of pressure to give you the best book I can at that moment. You know, not to phone it in.

Let’s look at another clip.

When pastors in the same place in life as Skip are beginning to phone it in or thinking about retirement, Pastor Skip and his team are re-envisioning what ministry looks like for millennials, my generation.

There, he’s talking about someone who’s close to retirement. That could be a classic time to work without enthusiasm, to just phone it in for another year or two, until you get to retire. But this particular pastor is not phoning it in. He’s diving in, working on big topics in the church. Let’s watch that clip one more time.

When pastors in the same place in life as Skip are beginning to phone it in or thinking about retirement, Pastor Skip and his team are re-envisioning what ministry looks like for millennials, my generation.

Now, dial it in. Originally this phrase had to do with car engines and tuning them for optimal performance, making little adjustments here and there, getting it perfect. Focus on perfection. The opposite of barely putting an effort, of phoning it in. Let’s look at some examples.

I want this type of milk. I want this type of bean. I want this type of caffeine. I want this temperature. You can really dial it in. You pick it. It hands it to you. It takes under 45 seconds.

So he’s talking about some sort of automatic coffee machine, and how it can get really specific, very detailed, it can dial it in, to make the exact perfect cup of coffee for you. Let’s see that again.

I want this type of milk. I want this type of bean. I want this type of caffeine. I want this temperature. You can really dial it in. You pick it. It hands it to you. It takes under 45 seconds.

Here’s another example.

But I use the drum sander to really dial it in. Now that we have our mortises cut, it’s easy to size these pieces to perfection.

He uses a particular tool to really dial it in, to focus and get the details right, so the end result is perfect. Let’s watch it again.

But I use the drum sander to really dial it in. Now that we have our mortises cut, it’s easy to size these pieces to perfection.

One final example.

Rather than going very wide in your work, or very wide in your personal life, you dial it in with a monomaniacal focus to be genius level at just as few things, that’s rigor.

Rather than going wide, you dial it in, you focus on just a few things and work so hard so that you really excel at them. This actually reminds me of the phrase ‘a jack of all trades, a master of none,. Do you know this phrase? A ‘jack of all trades’ is someone who can do a little bit of everything, but if you add on ‘a master of none’ that means you don’t really excel at any of those skills. So this guy is saying narrow your focus to just a few things, then you can really dial it in and get really good at them. Let’s watch that clip again.

Rather than going very wide in your work, or very wide in your personal life, you dial it in with a monomaniacal focus to be genius level at just as few things, that’s rigor.

Now, I’m going to let you really dive in with these phrases. We’re going to be watching longer excerpts so that you get more context. That will help you develop a deeper understanding of these idioms and how to use them. You’ll hear each excerpt twice to give you more time to process it and really understand how the idiom was used. We’ll do examples of each and then I’ll give you some advice on what to work on next.

And you’ve got to make it fresh every time. And you’ve got to find that passion within you every night to not just phone it in, not just press autopilot.
You clicked this video cause you wanna do homework faster, but you also wanna do a good job of it. You don’t want to phone it on or just skip it altogether.
If you just phone it in, might get a couple experience points. Down here at the bottom if you do a superlative job, better even than an “A”, you might get more experience points than were listed possible. And this is a sort of built-in extra credit for people who go above and beyond. The idea here is that everybody has different interests.

But if you’re writing a column, you really don’t ever want to phone it in. I mean you want somebody to want to read it and you want them to anticipate getting something out of it and looking forward to it. And you know if you just kind of throw it together, that’s not gonna be the case. You’re not gonna be doing it long. So not only do you want to come up with something, a good idea if you will, you want to feel like it’s good yourself. Right.

Sartre used this to mean that you have to accept the full weight of your freedom in light. You have to recognize that any meaning your life has, is given to it by you. And if you decide to just phone it in, and follow a path that someone else has set – whether it’s your teachers, your government, or your religion – then you have what he called bad faith, a refusal to accept the absurd. If you live by bad faith, you’re burying your head in the sand and pretending that something our there has meaning – meaning that you didn’t give it.

And stoles denote all honors denote all honors designations: highest honors, high honors, honors with distinction, and membership in the Phi Theta Kappa honor society. In other words, these graduates didn’t just phone it in, as they say. They dedicated themselves to excellence. Those of you wearing these special gold stoles and / or cords, please stand.

You’re depressed and miserable and you just live very mediocre life. Right, because you chose you were bored of this world and at some point in your life you chose to just kind of phone it in, and be a hack in life and not do anything amazing.

The other day, I stub my toe, a shoelace broke, I got gas on my car when I filled up, I almost got in an accident, and I was ready to phone it in. I was like, “You know what, this day’s done. I should just go home, put it in bed and call it a day.” My number one piece of career advice for any student who is getting ready to pursue a career in Washington is move to Washington. You can’t phone it in. There is a land of constant opportunity. Jobs are opening and jobs are being filled on a constant basis but being there is half of it. You have to take a chance.

If you find yourself not scoring in the 8 to 10 on any of these items; this is where we maybe, where we need to do some work. We need to start to dial it in, be more aware of it, be more conscious of it. Put some things in place to raise the awareness and raise the attention and focus that we put on that area.
The guage, it gets it close on your saw but I usually don’t trust it. I have to double check it with something else. I’m going to use this little guy and use this to dial it in dead on 45 degrees.

Every little thing needs to be just as good as possible out of camera. We’re trying to get better and better at shooting. I feel like we’re really starting to dial it in but the more and more you start to get particular about things needing to be as perfect as possible. The more that these little tiny screens end up quickly showing their faults.

It makes your garden smart, it’ll basically do what you need to do all automatically and dial it in so that you get some of the highest production, and more importantly, save the most water. Immediately when you put the system in, you could save up to 50% water easily and I’m sure once it gets dialled in and fine tuned, you’re gonna save even more.

So you can customize how much memory you’re going to have, how much CPU you’re going to have. And you could really dial it in. if you need graphics card, you can do that. If you need TPUs for doing TensorFlow, you can do that. It’s extremely flexible.
The way I did this on mine was to use the bubble level on my tripod to get my camera plumb and level and then I just assume that the floor and everything up from there was close enough for the purpose I have here. If you really wanted to dial it in, you could put another bubble level on top and use shims to get everything exactly right.

Now in this next example, it’s interesting. She uses ‘dial it in’ but she makes the same mistake I made. She should be using ‘phone it in’. because she’s talking about people who are not trying hard, who are not enthusiastic. That is ‘phone it in’. But she messes them up, she mixes them up, and uses ‘dial it in’.

This notion of engagement by the way is a huge business issue. Employees are not engaged. We go to work and we just dial it in, 62% of us just dial it in. and for a business, that’s a crisis.
And that’s why customer service is so bad.
That’s why it’s so bad.

So even native speakers can make this mistake but try to remember the difference between ‘phone it in’ and ‘dial it in’ .

This notion of engagement by the way is a huge business issue. Employees are not engaged. We go to work and we just dial it in, 62% of us just dial it in. and for a business, that’s a crisis.
And that’s why customer service is so bad.
That’s why it’s so bad.

Now if you do this at home and try it yourself, it could take you an hour or two or four to do everything, to dial it in exactly. But once you’re done with this, you’ll have a much, much better understanding of how light works and how your light modifiers work.

And the voters here in Florida and across the country are dialed in and paying attention.
What’s the dominant narrative here, and what do people think about it? And once we dialed in enough on that question, we realized that that was sort of the issue at the heart of all of the characters.

Oh, I love these idioms! If there are any idioms that you’ve been confused by, put them in the comments below, and maybe an explanation will make its way into a video. I do have a whole playlist on idioms that you can click on right now to keep on learning. Don’t phone it in, keep watching. And if you don’t already know, i make new videos every Tuesday, primarily to help non-native speakers of American English feel more comfortable with, confident in and knowledgeable in speaking American English.

I also have an academy, Rachel’s English Academy, where you can train to take your English communication skills to a new level, check it out at rachelsenglishacademy.com

That’s it and thanks so much for using Rachel’s English.

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