Weapons

Humankind has felt the need to protect themselves and their kin since the dawn of time. Although nobody wants to resort to violence, it can be a means to an end sometimes. Peoples all over the planet have been waging war on each other since it’s started spinning, and sadly I see no end in sight. Lock & load! Join me as we weigh in on the wild world of weapons on this week’s episode of FYI.

Transcript

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foreign has felt the need to protect themselves and their kin since the dawn of time although nobody wants to resort to violence it can be a means to an end sometimes peoples all over the planet have been Waging War on each other since it started spinning and sadly I see no end in sight Lock and Load join me as we weigh in on the wild world of weapons on this week's episode of f why I welcome to for your info English you got it you got it foreign to another exciting edition of FYI today we are gonna look at the wild world of weapons and I'll start off with a disclaimer I don't like weapons in general okay do they have a purpose yeah back in the day people needed to hunt for their food so like everything I guess it's a double-edged sword oh wait there's our first idiomatic expression I think in Spanish you say Arma de doble filo we say it's a double edged sword and if you noticed I didn't pronounce the w i don't say sword I said sword so for the record I don't like weapons I don't like violence or anything associated with violence I've always considered myself a bit of a Barefoot hippie Barefoot means with no shoes on and I think you know what a hippie is I stick to the motto Make Love Not War So today we're gonna take a look at weapons like them or not but this is one of these episodes where I'm gonna learn a lot too because I don't know the first thing about weapons I know some people in my country they can name every weapon as if it were a car model I can't do it with cars or weapons you know I can name every plane though but we're not here to talk about planes today we're here to talk about weapons but wait a second there's a connection many planes carry weapons and are made specifically to cause harm think of a bomber or a fighter see we're talking about Aviation already and I need to stay on topic let's start with our intro over here I started out by saying humankind has felt the need to protect themselves and their kin and your kin is your relatives your family members and I guess that's a logical thing who doesn't want to protect their family members and we've been doing this humankind since the dawn of time and the dawn of time is the beginning of time Dawn is another way to say the sunrise a lot of times you'll see in American Parks they're open From Dawn till Dusk or closed From Dusk Till Dawn I think you probably know it from a song I've been with you From Dusk Till Dawn I'll be with you from just Dome it's a really cool song If you haven't heard it and it's got that alliteration that you know I love Dusk Till Dawn also if something Dawns on you it occurs to you it's a very common way of saying it dawned on me I couldn't figure out the answer and then it dawned on me so it's a very useful word then I said although nobody wants to resort to violence and to resort to estregurira in Spanish some people believe that violence should be used as a last resort speaking of resorting to see we're always playing with words here on the show and then I said it can be a means to an end and I think that one's self-explanatory and then I said something weird and I'm sure some of your ears perked up I said peoples all over the planet and I know what you're thinking what do you mean peoples I thought it was people well we have an exception in English you can say peoples when you're talking about all different cultures I think it would be more like Gente de differentes the same way we can use persons as a plural but it's more used in police work they filed a missing persons report for all intents and purposes say person and people just take note there are a few exceptions then I said we've been Waging War on each other since it started spinning and to wage Wars to declare war and I wrapped up by saying sadly I see no end in sight well of course it's big business the War Machine and then I used an expression which I don't even really know what it means but I've seen so many movies with guns and yes we're going to talk about violence in movies as well but I've seen so many movies with guns that I know what people say a and I've heard it I would say thousands of times Lock and Load and to load the gun is cargarlo again I'm no expert here I was just gonna say I've never fired a gun in my life but that's not true I once did my TV show English on the go and we filmed it at a police academy and they let me shoot a gun but I have no idea what kind of gun it was but I have to admit it gave me a certain sense of power but I don't think I would ever go to a shooting range and do it as a hobby but I get how some people could get addicted to that feeling and then I wrapped the intro by saying join me as we weigh in on and to weigh in on means to give our opinion on oh and if I didn't mention it before I've heard people say weapons a million times it's not weapons miyarma it's weapons alright great now now that we've gotten that disclaimer out of the way and we looked at all the juicy vocabulary in our intro let's get started with a little definition a weapon is an object that can be used to attack or injure a person or animal or destroy property people have used weapons since very ancient times not Ancient Ancient while other animals use weapons in most cases they are attached to the animal things such as teeth Claws and tusks in our case as humans they are detached from us and they must be selected for the purpose at hand and I don't need to tell you we've been constantly developing newer and better weapons ever since we first picked up that rock it goes on to say individual people and Armed Forces use weapons to defend themselves or to attack an enemy and people also use weapons for hunting as we said before if you didn't want to go hungry you needed a weapon you needed something to go out there and kill your prey or you weren't gonna have dinner this is back in the day we were hunter gatherers at that time let's rewind and take a look at a little history the first weapons were things such as stones and wooden clubs every time you see a drawing of a caveman you see him with a club in his hand also police carry clubs in the modern day and back in the day they used to use these objects to protect themselves and to hunt for food some of the oldest remains that have been found were ancient weapons Made of Stone around the year twenty thousand BC they found some bow and arrows that were in use and if you don't know what a bow and arrow is just think of Robin Hood they also used Spears these were some of the earliest weapons available and you've got the good old-fashioned throw a rock at somebody's head well as you can see we've gotten a little bit more advanced since then we don't have to get our hands dirty anymore but let's not jump too far ahead later on ancient people made weapons out of bronze and iron and obviously this was during the Bronze Age when they were discovering all the possibilities of metals and this is when they started to develop special swords Spears and bow and arrows as we said before so we know some of the earliest Warriors who went out to battle had Spears bow and arrows and swords and don't forget they also needed to penetrate these big thick City walls and castles now things are made of brick and can be easily penetrated but back then these were big rock walls they were impenetrable or so it seems until the Catapult was invented and obviously this was a weapon that could throw something over one of these large walls also things like battering rams which are still used today Day by SWAT teams when they're trying to go into a house they will use a battering ram to knock the door down but the early ones were very similar but they were just large wooden beams and those wooden beams could break down doors and walls then around the Middle Ages which was 500 to 1500 A.D Europeans began to use more complex and deadlier weapons by the 900s for example they were using powerful crossbows and what is a crossbow well a crossbow is like a bow and arrow on a gun and you pull the trigger this is a really important word today trigger I think you say gatillo and the arrow flies through the air hopefully hitting its Target then in the 1300s they developed these large guns which we now call cannons and these weapons were powdered by gun powder I think you call it bolvora in Spanish and gunpowder is an explosive mixture of chemical substances it was invented by the Chinese if you've listened to enough of these episodes it seems like the Chinese invented everything and they had developed it hundreds of years before so they were ahead of their time but now with the invention of exploding gunpowder they could make their projectiles go even farther and these weapons were much better than the older weapons and obviously this Changed History the Europeans had really good weapons and what happened after that they conquered most of the world and it wasn't until the mid-1400s that the Spanish invented the first gun hey China's always in there but Spain's always got their two cents in there too their two yeah we've contributed a lot of stuff mops come on what would we do without mops the predecessor to the helicopter and did you know the predecessor to the modern gun it was a gun that was called a harkabus and it could be fired from a man's shoulder then in the 1500s that was improved upon and they came up with a larger gun and another gun that rested on the shoulder so they got that same idea from them and they called This Gun a musket I think in Spanish you call it mosquette they were used by militaries all over the place and this was also about the time we started seeing pistols or handheld guns so it's interesting guns have gotten bigger and smaller respectively because we've got these big cannons and now we've reduced it down to something that fits in the palm of our hand then it was around the 18 1800s when rifles came into wide use and rifles are still in use today what makes the rifle so interesting is that when bullets are shot from the rifle from the barrel they spin around as they travel and this makes the shots fired from the rifles much more accurate and accuracy is everything if you're talking about Warfare you want to hit your targets nobody likes collateral damage and then in the mid-1880s the first successful machine guns also began to be made and now you could fire many bullets in a row Every Time I Think of a machine gun I think of those old-time gangsters that was their weapon of choice and as we got into the world wars at the turn of the century as we know World War one was from 1914 to 1918 while the Armed Forces developed many new deadly weapons because there was a technology boom they could put bigger things in smaller spaces kind of like Computing today and then of course after that you had World War II which lasted from 1939 to 1945. some of the weapons that have been developed specifically for war are tanks poisonous gas how many times have you heard about the Vietnam War and they talk about agent orange and all this chemical warfare a weapon I've always liked but uh more in the video game sense because as I said I don't like weapons they're flame throwers call me a pyromaniac but I think flamethrowers are cool then you've got missiles rockets that could carry explosives to a Target bombs that could be strapped on an airplane so all of these breakthroughs were due to war and as we know the deadliest weapon ever used was the atomic bomb this was at the end of the second world war the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan on Hiroshima and Nagasaki so many people were killed and people who defend the bomb say that many lives were saved by dropping that bomb I I really don't know enough about the topic to have my own opinion but as I said I'm always against violence and I remember when I went to Hiroshima in Japan it was incredible I could still feel the energy there the sadness the destruction the hopelessness that was still in the air and that was definitely a turning point we entered the nuclear age and I don't think anybody wants nuclear war because what they've realized that if you want nuclear war there's only one thing that can happen one outcome and that is mad mutually assured destruction that means everybody will be blown to Smithereens the most powerful device ever detonated by mankind is the Russian Tsar bomb it is a behemoth a behemoth is something that is huge in 1961 when it was detonated it created a mushroom cloud it went about 65 kilometers into the sky if you're not good at calculating math let me give you a comparison that's about seven times as tall as Mount Everest oh and we've got an episode on Mount Everest if you haven't given it a listen do so this mushroom cloud could be seen 600 miles away from the site 600 miles is around a thousand kilometers folks so you don't want to piss Russia off well let's just put it this way you don't want to piss off anybody who's got nuclear bomb bombs there's only one way it can end and that's bad for everybody and I think the war machine the military industrial complex those are the ones who make money off War I mean they don't really want war to end the minute the war ends well they're not making money that's why a lot of times we enter in these unwinnable wars hey this is just my opinion this part but I think a lot of these wars Afghanistan Vietnam Iraq things like that these wars were never meant to be won they were just meant to keep the cash machine going it's big business there's no denying it but at what cost that's a question we ask ourselves in every episode of FYI and we have begun to glorify violence as a society I mean you just have to watch the news the only thing they show is violence people arguing and we know why because violence cells people are interested they want to see it it's like morbid curiosity why do you think movies with violence are so popular I have to admit I've gotten a little bit gunned out that means I don't want any more guns I remember seeing some movies where there was so much firing going on so much shooting that I was like so who's shooting who what's going on where I've gotten lost and I understand in order to tell some stories you need violence you can't tell the story of the mafia and keep it all clean and family friendly but also glorifying violence showing people you know pulling out guns as if they were pieces of gum I don't think is good for young people especially when we're so impressionable so I know I sound like a concerned Dad here but there is much too much violence in video games in movies in pop culture in general now the other side of that coin I don't expect my TV or Hollywood to take care of or to raise my daughter so parents who say it's the video games they're making the kids violent well you're the parent you have to be the one who says not in my home so there's you know that's a gray area too okay things are violent but also you as a parent you can also decide what comes into your home we don't buy my daughter gun toys my parents never bought me gun toys so for us guns were just something that was distant something we didn't really know much about the unknown and what I think it's doing is normalizing violence because if you watch a movie and somebody fires off 200 rounds well you know some people even older people we said kids are impressionable some older people too they'll start to see it as normal and as I said earlier I don't think violence is ever the answer let's take a look at a fun fact over here oh and by the way folks if you're gonna join us in the bonus part today because remember every week There's a bonus episode which is reserved exclusively for my patrons so if you want to join my Curious community and get a bonus episode every week get PDF documents with all the content have weekly group classes with me and even monthly private classes with me will then consider joining my Curious community on patreon we are having a blast learning and laughing together so if you want to join Us in the bonus episode and even join us in class go over to patreon.com Alberto Alonso and take a look around and of course let me know if you have any questions in the bonus episode today we're going to take a look at other kinds of weapons tons of fun facts and we're going to look at a lot of idiomatic expressions that have to do with weapons all that and much more in the bonus episode and again that's reserved exclusively for my students on patreon along with all the other bonus content and speaking of my patrons I'd like to send a shout out to each and every one of you especially my super duper students Lina Javier Paco Roberto Jose Maria and Mila and don't forget about my Interstellar students the ones who get a monthly class with me Carmen Isa Paco David and Edgar join our exciting English class on patreon we're expecting you okay where were we oh right we were going to give you a fun fact just a little teaser to wet your appetite are you familiar with the uzi I think in Spanish you say uthi well then how do you know the difference between ICU lauti and uthi hey that's confusing well either way in English it's Uzi which is a submachine gun we know it from movies as I said but did you know how it got its name it's named after an Israeli arms expert but this guy didn't want it to be named after him his name Uzi gal and he invented the uzi in 1956. well guess what Israel ignored his wishes and they decided to name it after him anyway tough luck buddy oh and of course since he was a state state employee he didn't make too much money off his invention either we'll look at more fun facts in the bonus episode we're gonna wrap up the first part of today's show with a quote from The Art of War by Sun TSU a military strategist and adviser to a King in China and this was around 500 BC the greatest Victory is that which requires no battle I love it it's short and it's sweet folks I sure hope you enjoyed this part of the show and that you'll join us in the bonus episode of today's FYI