This mini episode teaches you the very strange old expression “How do you like them apples?”
Episode 254 of the Everybody ESL podcast is a mini episode that teaches you the very strange old expression “How do you like them apples?” 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.)
Intro
“Hi! This is Amy, from Bucheon, Korea. And you’re listening to Everybody ESL.”
Welcome to episode 254 of Everybody ESL, the podcast for everybody who wants to improve their English, practice their English, or just learn more English. My name is Ben, and I have a mini episode for you today, where I am going to teach you about one English topic. You can subscribe to the Everybody ESL podcast at Apple podcasts, on the Stitcher app, and wherever you find your podcasts. If you like Everybody ESL, leave it a good review so other people can find out about it too. And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for me, please send an email to everybodyESL@gmail.com. Okay! Let’s get on with this mini episode.
The episode
In this episode, we are going to learn about a very strange old expression. And that expression is “How do you like them apples?” How do you like them apples?
That’s how, do, you, like, them, apples. “How do you like them apples?”
Before we talk about what this expression means and how to use it, I need to talk about the word them. This expression uses the word them in a strange way: them apples. What does that mean, them apples? You probably are not familiar with the word them used in that way. You have probably never heard them used to modify or describe apples. Them apples.
In some varieties of English—in some nonstandard varieties of English—them can be used in the same way as the word those. In some nonstandard varieties of English, you can talk about “them apples” instead of “those apples.” And that is how them is used in the expression “How do you like them apples?” It just means “How do you like those apples?”
That part is simple, but what does the whole thing mean? “How do you like them apples?” How do you like those apples? What apples? What does this expression mean?
We use “How do you like them apples?” as a way to tease someone who has just learned some shocking or negative information or to tease someone who has just lost some kind of competition.
Let me give you an example of a situation where you might hear someone use the expression “How do you like them apples?”
Imagine that in a classroom, there is one student who always tells everybody, “I am the best! I am the best student in the class. I am the smartest. I always get the highest grades. I always do the best on every exam.”
After an exam, when the students see their scores, this one student holds up his paper, and he says, “Look! I got a 99%. That is excellent. I’m sure that nobody got a better score than me!”
And then, another student walks up to that first student and shows him her exam. And she says, “I got a 100 on the exam. How do you like them apples?”
Here, you can see that “How do you like them apples?” is used to tease someone who has just lost some kind of contest or to tease someone who has just learned something shocking, something very surprising and negative.
In my example, it was a kid who used this expression, and I don’t know if kids really use this expression anymore. It is a very old expression. They say that it started in World War One. And if that’s true, this expression is more than a hundred years old. And it does sound a little bit old-fashioned. So I don’t know if kids actually use this expression.
That is “How do you like them apples?”—a very strange and interesting expression that I think you should know.
Outro
This is the end of episode 254 of Everybody ESL. Remember: if you have any questions about English, or if you have comments or suggestions about the podcast, or if you would like to record an introduction that I can play at the beginning of future episodes—the same way Amy recorded the introduction you heard at the beginning of this episode—send an email to everybodyESL@gmail.com. I’ll be back soon with a new episode, and until then, keep going, keep practicing, and keep learning. Goodbye! I’ll see you soon.