What's new on IELTS with Fiona

🐥 Do you know the story about Henny Penny? (Also known as ‘Chicken Little’).

🐓 It's a European folk tale about a chicken who believes that the world is coming to an end (because an acorn falls on his head). He runs around repeating "The sky is falling!".

😱 This phrase is now a quite common idiom indicating a hysterical or mistaken belief that disaster is imminent (= coming soon).

It is even used in quite formal contexts e.g. I saw this in the Harvard Business Review:

‘The sky’ or ‘This guy’?

Today I saw this cartoon about the pronunciation of this idiom, which sounds exactly like "This guy is falling".

It reminded me about fact that words with the 'sc' spelling e.g. discuss are actually pronounced as 'g' - 'disguss'.

In this example, "this guy" sounds like "the sky".

‘This’ and ‘the’ are both weak, so they sound the same in connected speech before ‘a’.

(See this excellent video, where Dr Geoff Lindsay explains it much better than I do!).

Tip for fast speech issues:

Focus on the context, and think about what makes sense. 

For example, "This guy is funny" makes sense, but "The sky is funny" probably doesn't.