The English We Speak: Make a pig's ear of something
Learning English Conversations
BBC
4.6 ⢠1.2K Ratings
đď¸ 27 October 2025
âąď¸ 3 minutes
đď¸ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
This expression is about doing something badly. Learn how to use it here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.9 | What's best? A morning shower or an evening shower? |
| 0:09.9 | What can magic teach us about the brain? |
| 0:12.7 | Making friends as you get older? |
| 0:14.9 | These are all topics you'll discover in the reading room, |
| 0:18.5 | our new series of magazine-style articles on our website. |
| 0:22.1 | They each come with highlighted vocabulary, comprehension questions and an audio download. |
| 0:27.6 | Learn about the world and improve your reading skills with the Reading Room at BBC learning |
| 0:32.7 | English.com. |
| 0:35.6 | Hello and welcome to the English We Speak, where we explain expressions used by fluent English |
| 0:42.2 | speakers so that you can use them too. I'm Faye Faye and I'm joined by Georgie and that is an |
| 0:49.6 | interesting hairstyle, Georgie. Oh Faye Faye, I was really bored of my usual hairstyle, so I'd try something different today. |
| 0:57.0 | But it was a really difficult hairstyle to do, and I ended up making a real pig's ear of it. |
| 1:03.6 | Oh, well, you could try again tomorrow. |
| 1:06.5 | So why would you mention a pig's ear when you are talking about a bad hairstyle? |
| 1:12.0 | Well, that's what we're going to learn in this program. |
| 1:15.2 | What does it mean to make a pig's ear of something? |
| 1:18.5 | Well, if you make a pig's ear of something, you do something badly. |
| 1:22.9 | You've messed it up. |
| 1:23.9 | So I tried really hard to give myself a cool hairstyle, but I made a pig's ear of it. My hair |
| 1:29.2 | is a mess. This is an informal, light-hearted idiom that you're most likely hear in British English. |
| 1:36.6 | It can be used in a variety of context, can't it? Yes, it can. Fofo, when was the last time you saw |
... |
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