Hello and welcome to the English like a native podcast.
My name is Anna and you're listening to week 57 day three of your English five a day.
This is the series that gives you a healthy daily dose of English vocabulary so that you can,
one step at a time, start feel more like yourself as you grow your English vocabulary.
So let's begin with the idiom, stand up and be counted.
Stand up and be counted.
Stand S T A N D up U P and B B E counted C O U N T E D. Stand up and be counted.
This means to make your opinion known even if doing so might cause harm or difficulty.
So this always makes me think of that very old but classic movie Spartacus.
Is that the actual name of the movie?
I might be wrong there but there's that scene that's so famous where someone asks for Spartacus and a man stands up and says,
I'm Spartacus but then to protect Spartacus all these other people begin to stand and say,
I'm Spartacus I'm Spartacus and they all stand and declare that they are Spartacus in order to protect the individual.
They stand together knowing that they could come to harm.
They're putting themselves in harm's way in order to protect someone and what they're doing is making their opinion known.
I think it's always been the case but at the moment I would say there is a lot of public and social debate and discussion that can easily become heated
because there's a lot of issues that people feel very strongly about and some people are very keen or happy to declare where they sit.
Other people sit on the fence because they're not sure or because they don't want to get into a debate or an argument.
So some people sit on the fence and don't publicly declare their opinions.
For example, if we're talking about politics, how do you feel about Donald Trump being re-elected as president?