沒有在深夜痛哭過的人，不足以談人生
Hello again, and welcome back to Lulu’s happy hour.歡迎你回到璐璐的小酒館。
The background music I chose for today is a famous aria by Handel. The name translated into English is 「Let me weep」.今天背景音樂選擇的是亨德爾的一首非常有名的詠嘆調，叫做「讓我痛哭吧」。And this is going to be our topic for today. In the previous episode, we talked about all the these expressions relative to laughter, and today, let’s look at tears and the crying.今天小酒館裡就讓我們從歡笑過度到淚水，來談一談哭這個話題。
Before we look at different types of crying, let’s look at the word 『tear』. Now TEAR can be pronounced tear/[tɪə], it can also be pronounced tear/[tea(r) ].是英文裡的多音字。And the meanings are completely different. When you wanna talk about crying, the word is tear/[tɪə], when you wanna talk about to rip something apart, you pronouncing as tear/[tear ].表示撕裂的時候，這個詞會讀成tear/[tear ]。For instance, you tear up a piece of paper.
Today, of course, we are focusing on the 1st type tear. Like laughter, there’re also different types and different levels of crying. Very loud crying, also, the very silent type of crying. Let’s start from the silent types. When we have tear in our eyes but we are not making a sound, we can tear up. We have tears in our eyes, it can be for happy or sad reasons we tear up. We tear up when we finally get back together with our loved ones. Moving on from completely silent to making a little bit of sound, you can sniffle. Sniffle is when you’re making sound from your nose.我們說抽抽嗒嗒、抽噎。So it’s like… This is sniffle. We also use the word 『weep』, like the background music 「Let me weep」. W-E-E-P. Weep means you have tears coming out, it can again be happy or sad, but weep is more written and literary. 比較書面、比較文藝This is why you hear it in songs and see it in poems. Moving on, we have sob, S-O-B. 抽泣。This is a bit louder than sniffle, so you probably have both your nose and throat. And the very loud crying for instance, we have word 「wail」. To wail, usually for something so so sad and so devastating 痛哭、哀嚎 W-A-I-L. A very famous landmark in Jerusalem is The wailing wall. The wailing wall.耶路撒冷的哭牆就是用的這個詞。 So we tear up, sniffle, weep, sob or even wail. Coming back to the word tear itself. 中文我們說流淚 In English, the verb is to shed a tear. S-H-E-D. To shed a tear. Of course there’re tears of sadness but there’re also tears of joy. Tears of joy is when you tear up on the a happy occasion.欣喜的淚水 Tear of joy. An athlete finally winning the medal, or new Mom looking at her baby for the very first time, tear of joy. When we have tears in our eyes, we get teary-eyed. 眼裡含淚 Teary-eyed, you can use it as an adjective, but tears are not always about sadness or happiness, you can also have fake tears. In Chinese, we have 假慈悲, in English, you have crocodile tears.鱷魚的眼淚 Usually means you’re not really sad, you just pretend to be sad. You can say he shed crocodile tears over the accident, that means he didn’t really mean it, he didn’t really feel sad. Sometimes when we read a moving story or watch a very nice film, we will get teary-eyed, because the story is so sad or really really moving, then we can call this type of stories or movies a tear jerker. A tear jerker. J-E-R-K-E-R. It will make you cry. 煽情催淚的文藝作品 You can call it a tear jerker. Yesterday I re-watched the animated film 「Coco」, I was teary-eyed the first time I watched it and I cried again, so that was such a tear jerker. But sometimes tears are not just tears. In English, people say Blood, Sweat and Tears. Blood, Sweat and Tears中文我們說心血、血汗 In English, you add in tears, all of this are your efforts, your maximum efforts, you can say, I have poured blood, sweat and tears into this company, I can’t let you destroy it. 全部的心血和血汗都投入到裡面 Blood, Sweat and Tears. These are some of the words and phrases.
How do we use tears in the sentence? Now, let’s look at some sentence structures. If we are about to cry, but we haven’t cried yet, we can say we are close to tears. The tears are in your eyes, they are not coming out. We are close to tear, we are about to cry. When we actually cry, we are in tears, we are in tears. We can also burst into tears, suddenly start to cry, burst into tears. B-U-R-S-T. Have you ever been in the situation where you just can’t hold in any longer, so you』ll burst into tears. There’re different reasons we will cry. We cry when we’re happy, we cry when we are sad, we cry when we are moved. 被感動的時候 We can be moved to tears, by movies, by stories, by nice things other people say. Moved to tears. But in English, you can also be bored to tears. If someone is so so boring, you can also be bored to tears. Sometimes when we look at the story, we know it’s not going to have a happy ending then we can predict that this is going to end in tears. You can say, we are not meant to be together and this is definitely going to end in tears. 會意淚水終結 And for all of us, there’re times we wanna cry so much but because we are adults, we have other people counting on us, so we have to try very hard not to cry, that we fight back tears. We fight back tears. We use the word 『fight』 because it’s very very difficult. He was trying to fight back tears as he announced the sad news. 拼命忍住眼淚 To fight back tears.
In the end, let’s look at some expressions with the word cry. We have all cried at one point or another. When things get really tough, we might cry our eyes out. Cry one’s eyes out. 中文說把眼睛哭瞎了 In English, it’s cry one’s eyes out. We may also cry ourselves to sleep. Cry ourselves to sleep. Usually we cry for a reason, we can cry over something or someone. There is an expression in English called no use crying of the spilt milk. If you spilt the milk, you lose it, you won’t get it back, so there is no use crying over it. 牛奶已經灑了，再哭也哭不回來，覆水難收。 No use crying over spilt milk. It’s all very sad when people cry but sometimes you can’t cry too much, therefore being perceived as quite weak and fragile. We use the word cry baby, especially a Mom-kids, if you say you’re such a cry baby to mean they cry too much, they are too vulnerable. 愛哭鬼叫Cry baby。Nobody wants to be a cry baby. What’s worse, sometimes cry babies they are no just crying because they are sad, they cry because they know they can thing with their tears. What they do is they turn on the water works. They start crying and trying to get things. Turn on the water works. 故意假哭、撒嬌、博同情 So next time when you see a cry baby doing that, you can say, well, here goes the water works. 又來眼淚攻勢了 Here goes the water works.
To finish today’s episode, I want to share with you a quote about crying I saw the other day. It’s says when someone is crying, of course the noble thing to do is to comfort them, but if someone is trying to hide their tears, it may also be noble to pretend you do not notice them.
And that’s all for today, if you like my show, please don’t forget to follow and subscribe.