Winning English - Mastering Idioms, Slang, and References
No time like the present • Time is on our side • We are out of time • Our time is up
This weekend, people in US turned their clocks back one hour. It was the end of Daylight Saving Time. Many countries use Daylight Saving Time to adjust work schedules as daylight gets longer and shorter through the seasons. (See the interesting history of DST here.) This started me thinking about the many English idioms involving time. I thought to myself, “That would be a great theme for the newsletter. Well, there’s no time like the present!”
“There’s no time like the present” is an idiom that means you should start a project or task immediately. Most often you say this to yourself - or maybe to your team at work - in order to get people to take action.
Just to be clear, “the present” here means “right now”, as in the past, present, and future. It does not refer to the other meaning of present, which means “a gift”.
The sooner you get started on a project, the more time you will have to learn and succeed. This can be true with investing money, too. The sooner you start saving and investing, the more your investments will grow. After all, if you start when you are young, time is on your side.
“Time is on your (or our) side” is a saying we use to express that we can be patient and wait for things to happen. For example, suppose you are negotiating a business contract. The other side really needs what you are selling, but they want a very low price. You don’t need the sale so badly. You might say to yourself, “Well, time is on our side. We’ll wait to see if they agree to a higher price.”
Suppose you are sitting in a conference room negotiating that contract. You might notice that you have another meeting to attend. You could say, “I see we are out of time. Shall we schedule another time to meet?”
Photo by Damir Kopezhanov on Unsplash
When you say “we are (or I am) out of time”, it means that you have reached the end of an appointment or a meeting, or perhaps that you have reached a deadline. (A deadline is the time when you must have a project done. I’ll explain the history of that in the next newsletter.)
Another saying that has the same meaning as “we are out of time” is “our time is up”. It means you must finish what you are doing. In fact, our time is up for this newsletter!
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