Episode 78 Idioms To Use When You Can't Trust Something

Today we are looking at idioms that describe untrustworthy behaviour, untrustworthy people or things you can't quite believe. There are a surprising amount of these. Some of them can be tied back to previous episodes where we talked about keeping secrets and telling lies, both of which can be seen as untrustworthy behaviour.  See you next week! Today's Idioms To pull a fast one - to try and trick someone To rip someone off - to try and trick someone out of their money or make them spend more than is necessary. Something can also be described as 'a rip off' meaning they are asking you to pay much more than it is worth. To be in cahoots - to be working together, usually with a bad or untrustworthy goal, but it could also be used for friends organising a surprise party To avoid something like the plague - to don't go near something, (also 'to give something a wide berth') to avoid it as much as you can. Smoke and mirrors - illusion and subterfuge, what you see isn't really there, you can't trust what you see. I mentioned Trump's recent issues with the value of his properties. If you scroll down on this article you can see what I mean. He vastly inflated (falsely increased) the value of his properties so that he could get more bank loans. One of the most ridiculous was Mar-a-Lago which had an actual value of $75 million but Trump increased it to $739 million! https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/trump-accused-of-lying-about-property-values-but-did-lies-hurt-everyday-new-yorkers/3875733/ Stretch the truth/bend the truth - similar to 'little white lie' this is when we take an element of truth and make it more than it is to hide something else or lie about something else. You can't trust someone as far as you can throw them - a phrase to say when you can't trust someone at all Take it with a pinch of salt - Don't believe what you hear, or understand that there isn't much truth in what they're telling you. Full of hot air - they have nothing of value or truth to tell you. They might be really good at telling a story and sound very believable, but it's not the truth. Additional Vocabulary mate - a word for friend dude - an American word for friend, usually male friends but can be applied casually to everyone sometimes hint - a little piece of information that suggests something super loaded - 'loaded' is slang for very rich, so if someone is 'super loaded' then they have lots and lots of money subterfuge - an act of hiding something from someone illusion - what you see is not the truth an element of truth - phrase used to describe something that contains some, but not the whole of the truth A compulsive liar - describe someone who can't help but lie. It is often used to describe people who are addicted to lying or have a tendency to lie more often than they tell the truth. The butt of my podcast - this was a play on words. Usually we say someone is the 'butt of the joke', which means they are the target of the joke, we are joking about them. In this case it seemed like I mentioned Trump a lot in the podcast today, I wasn't intentionally targeting him, but it might have seemed that way. You come across people - phrasal verb - if you 'come across' something then it means you find it by chance I'm all ears - idiom - means 'I am listening' or 'I want to hear what you have to say' we often use this to tell someone they can start telling us about something, we are ready to hear.