Hi everybody, welcome back to Ask Alicia, the weekly series where you ask me questions and I answer them.

Maybe. Let's get to your first question this week. First question this week comes from Laura. Hi Laura.

Laura asked, what's the difference between keep away and keep off? They seem like the same. Yeah, great question. What is the difference between keep away and keep off?

They do have kind of a very similar meaning, but let's break down that tiny little difference

that we have here.

So first, let's talk about keep off.

To keep something off of something else means to do something to prevent something else from like landing on it or going on top of it in some way.

So maybe a great example for this might be if you have a picnic outside somewhere and you have your food on the table,

but there are lots of flies or bugs or something like that and they want to land on the food,

you might say, ugh, we need to keep the flies off the food,

or we need to keep the bees off the food. So off in this way is like the opposite of on, right?

So the bugs want to go on the food. We want to keep them off. So this keep doesn't mean like hold,

but rather it means prevent something from landing

in this case. So we want to keep the flies or keep the bugs off the food. So we use this in

situations where we're trying to prevent something from happening. So keep that thing off that

other thing is the pattern that you will see. On the other hand, keep away can be used in a couple of different situations.

There's one situation that's like a little bit of a dangerous situation.

Like you find something that's really scary, maybe like a snake,

or maybe you find a really, I don't know, dangerous person.

You might say, keep away from the snake snake or like keep away from the tiger,

keep away from that guy. It means that thing is dangerous or that thing is bad. So that means

don't go over there. Don't go near that thing. So again, this keep doesn't mean like hold

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