This mini episode teaches you the useful expression “gray area.”
Episode 172 of the Everybody ESL podcast is a mini episode that teaches you the useful expression “gray area.” What does it mean, and how can you use it? Send your questions about English and your suggestions for future episodes to EverybodyESL@gmail.com! (And let me know if you’d like to record the introduction to a future episode.)
The expression I’m going to teach you today is “gray area.” Gray area. That's gray: g-r-a-y. And area: a-r-e-a. Gray area.
Before I go any further, I need to mention one small point: you might wonder about the spelling of gray. Now, I told you that it is spelled g-r-a-y. But that is only the way that it is spelled in American English. In the United Kingdom, and in other countries that use spelling that is based on British English, the word gray is spelled g-r-e-y. Okay. I just didn't want you to be confused about that. Now, back to our topic.
What is a gray area? When do we use this expression?
A gray area is any situation that cannot easily be put into a category like good or bad. It's a situation that has some good things and some bad things. Or a situation that has some things that are like this and other things that are like that. It is a gray area because it isn't black or white. It's somewhere in the middle. It’s a little bit of both. Just like black and white make gray when you mix them together, a situation that has some good things and some bad things is described as a gray area.
Let me give you an example of this expression used in a sentence.
Imagine that somebody says, “Lying is bad. You should never tell a lie. You should always tell the truth.”
And then someone asks that person, “Okay, but what if you tell a lie to protect somebody's feelings? What if you tell a lie so that you don't make somebody feel bad? I think lying can be good.”
The first person might say, “Hmm . . . I think that's kind of a gray area.”
In other words, that situation is a little bit difficult to define. It’s a little bit difficult to put it into a category. Maybe something like that is a little bit good and a little bit bad. Maybe it has some qualities of both of those things. It isn't all one way or all another way. It's more difficult to define or to describe. You could call that situation a gray area.
And that is "gray area," a useful expression that I think you should know.