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Where Is the Hole When You Miss Someone? Four Languages of Absence. The episode explores missing someone as a feeling with a specific “location,” then compares how English, French, Spanish, and Arabic map absence differently. English “I miss you” (from missan, failing to hit) frames missing as an active reach across distance, like repeatedly arriving where someone should be and finding emptiness. French “tu me manques” (“you are lacking to me,” from mancus, maimed) places the hole in the body and links missing to craving, illustrated with phantom-limb research (Silas Weir Mitchell, Ramachandran’s mirror box) and Mary-Frances O’Connor’s work on how the brain encodes loved ones as “near.” Spanish “te echo de menos” treats absence as an inventory that comes up short, while “te extraño” makes the world feel strange and foreign. Arabic “wahashtini” (WAHSH) casts absence as desolation and wilderness, contrasted with “shawq” longing and the pair wahsha/uns. The episode notes missing can become a shrine or a demand, suggests answering the brain’s “map” through rituals rather than reunion, and concludes that every kind of missing records love. 00:00 Where Is The Hole 00:48 Four Maps Of Missing 01:44 English The Archer 04:39 French The Phantom Limb 10:14 Spanish The Heart Inventory 13:42 Arabic Wilderness And Uns 18:08 Which Map Fits You 19:55 The Shadow Side Of Missing 21:28 Answering The Inner Map 22:31 Missing As Proof Of Love 23:06 Final Question And Farewell

Join us on English Plus Podcast as we take a deep dive into the impact of social media on society and culture. In this episode, we'll discuss both the positive and negative aspects of social media, touching on topics like connectivity, activism, mental health, and misinformation. We'll also examine the influence of social media on personal relationships and cultural trends. To round things off, we'll delve into the English language, introducing you to interesting words, phrases, and idiomatic expressions you can use to improve your language skills. Don't miss out on this insightful and engaging conversation! Find the interactive transcript on https://englishpluspodcast.com/the-impact-of-social-media-on-society-and-culture/ Support the show Support our mission to keep creating high-quality educational and entertaining content available to everyone around the world. Become my patron on Patreon today and unlock a world of learning and knowledge through exclusive premium episodes, audio and video series/courses. And never stop learning with the myriad of topics and content types that I add daily to my website englishpluspodcast.com Mentioned in this episode: Visit our website to keep the learning going. Support us on Patreon

A butterfly moves its wings in one part of the world, and weeks later a storm gathers on the other side of it. It sounds like a fairy tale, but it began as mathematics. In this episode, we follow the delicate, dizzying idea that the smallest things we do may quietly rewrite lives we'll never meet — and ask what it means to matter more than we can ever measure.

You can sleep eight hours and still wake up tired. Why? In this new UpGrade episode, we climb three levels of English about one of the most universal experiences there is: being stressed and mentally drained. We start with the simple, honest words you need at the elementary level, add the color and nuance of intermediate phrasal verbs and collocations, and finish with the sophisticated, almost poetic language that advanced speakers use to describe exactly how depletion feels. Along the way you will pick up grammar that makes your feelings land clearly, speaking tips for admitting you are struggling without sounding weak, and a few genuinely useful ideas about rest and recovery. Bring your tired brain. We will give it something good to chew on.

Russian locates surrender in the body, not the mind. And its grammar quietly admits that despair is something that happens to you rather than something you decide. Let's look at what the research says about which half of that is actually learned. Mentioned in this episode: Support us on Patreon Visit our website to keep the learning going.

We tell people to read the room as if it were the most natural thing in the world. But a room isn't a book. It has no words, no pages, no lines. So how do we read it? In this episode, we take a closer look at one of the most quietly profound skills a human being can have — and why learning to read the silence might be the deepest kind of literacy there is. Mentioned in this episode: Support us on Patreon Visit our website to keep the learning going.

In this episode of our Unlearn Series, we take apart the entire machinery of fake self-improvement: the perfect guru and why we trust the mask, the myth of the fixed and finished self, and toxic positivity as a counterfeit of real growth. Then we build something better in its place. Drawing on Carl Rogers, self-compassion research, the psychology of shame and guilt, the masks we present to the world, and the parts of ourselves we keep in the shadow, we look at how genuine change is built on acceptance rather than self-attack. There are real examples, real applications, and concrete frameworks you can use, including the honest inventory, the shame-versus-guilt fork, and the practice of self-compassion that actually motivates instead of paralyzes. No cheerleading, no fixes in five steps, no pretending. Just a guide who is openly flawed, walking through it with you, so you can think more clearly about your own life and find your own way forward. Mentioned in this episode: Visit our website to keep the learning going. Support us on Patreon

We use it to describe the things we love and lose — a sunset, a season, a moment we wish we could keep. But what if the fleeting nature of a thing isn't the tragedy we think it is? In this episode, we sit with a word made of a single day, and ask whether permanence would have ruined the very things we treasure most. Mentioned in this episode: Support us on Patreon Visit our website to keep the learning going.

Arabic doesn't say you hurt someone. It says you broke something inside them. And it keeps a matching verb for the repair — a bone-setting word that also gave the world algebra. Let's go inside the fracture Mentioned in this episode: Visit our website to keep the learning going. Support us on Patreon

One year a food is a miracle “superfood,” the next it's quietly dropped and something new takes its place. Diet and nutrition trends move fast, the headlines shout, and it can be genuinely hard to know what to believe. In this Progressive English lesson, we're not here to tell you what to eat — we're here to give you the English to talk about it intelligently and the thinking skills to separate solid information from clever marketing. We climb three levels, from the basic vocabulary of food and health, through the language of trends and polite disagreement, all the way up to the sophisticated art of expressing skepticism and weighing evidence. You'll come away able to hold your own in any conversation about food — and a little harder to fool. Mentioned in this episode: Visit our website to keep the learning going. Support us on Patreon

We reach for it when we feel small: my effort is just a drop in the ocean. It's a phrase built to make us feel that nothing we do could ever be enough. But what if we've been reading it backwards this whole time? In this episode, we look again at the drop, at the ocean, and at the humbling, hopeful truth that hides in the space between them. Mentioned in this episode: Visit our website to keep the learning going. Support us on Patreon

In this episode of Danny's Petty Manifesto, The Satirist opens with a modest proposal: what if "reply all" were reclassified under the legal framework of digital assault? From there, he traces the surprisingly ancient lineage of humanity's need to broadcast the mundane — from the town crier bellowing about grain prices to the medieval monk who copied manuscripts no one asked for. The historical parallels are both comforting and devastating. The episode then turns its deadpan gaze to the modern corporate inbox, where reply-all has become the weapon of choice for middle managers seeking relevance, colleagues announcing their lunch plans to an entire department, and that one person who types "Thanks!" to three hundred recipients as though gratitude were a performance art. The Satirist dismantles the social mechanics of unnecessary email with surgical precision, examining why we confuse volume with value and visibility with contribution. The episode closes with a sweeping manifesto — The Declaration of Targeted Silence — a call for humanity to rediscover the radical, revolutionary act of simply not hitting send. It is a love letter to restraint, a eulogy for the uncluttered inbox, and a reminder that sometimes the most powerful thing you can say is absolutely nothing at all. Mentioned in this episode: Visit our website to keep the learning going. Support us on Patreon

Somewhere along the way, conversation became a pitch. We open with a hook, deliver our value proposition, keep it short, keep it emotional, and wrap it up before anyone checks their phone. We do it at work, and we do it with strangers, but the strange and sad part is that many of us now do it with the people closest to us. In this episode, Danny looks at what happens when every talk has to make sense, stay on topic and earn its place. It begins with the story of a young Beirut entrepreneur who has rehearsed the perfect sixty-second pitch, and then gets trapped in an elevator for two hours with the investor he was pitching and a teenage delivery boy with a bag of shawarma. From there, Danny looks at the murky origins of the elevator pitch, the famous claim that we now have shorter attention spans than goldfish and why it doesn't hold up, research showing that we badly underestimate how much others want deeper conversation, and an old Arabic proverb that says talk has many branches. He also makes a serious case for brevity, admits that he's a professional compressor himself, and asks what we're losing when we never reach the third hour of a conversation. Join the conversation on Patreon at dannyballan.com or at englishpluspodcast.com. Mentioned in this episode: Visit our website to keep the learning going. Support us on Patreon

A billionaire predicts that in ten to twenty years, nobody will need to work, money will stop mattering, and governments will simply pay everyone enough to live well. He may even be right about the machines. This episode isn't about whether the robots can do it. It's about what happens to you the day your income stops being something you earned and becomes something you receive — from an institution that can also stop. We look at strikes you can no longer call, wars you can no longer refuse, a class system with no ladder in it, and roughly seven billion people who were never in the room when the plan was drafted. Sarcastic for a while. Then not at all. Read the full article on my website: https://englishpluspodcast.com/universal-high-income-sounds-wonderful-until-you-ask-who-signs-the-check/ Mentioned in this episode: Support us on Patreon Visit our website to keep the learning going.

Somewhere along the way, the people who cure diseases, write the books that outlive us, and teach children to read stopped being celebrated and started being described as "boring." Meanwhile, attention and money have flowed toward a kind of fame that produces very little that lasts. In this episode, we take that story apart — including the parts of it that aren't true. Were scientists and poets ever really celebrities? What actually collapsed, and when? Why is the influencer economy a lottery rather than a career? And what do you honestly say to a seventeen-year-old who asks whether it's stupid to want to be a physicist, a translator, or a high school teacher — when the honest answer isn't a motivational poster? This one includes a section where the jokes stop entirely, because the money part deserves that. It ends somewhere small. Read the full article on my website: https://englishpluspodcast.com/the-boring-people-built-everything-why-we-stopped-celebrating-scientists-poets-and-teachers/ Mentioned in this episode: Visit our website to keep the learning going. Support us on Patreon