I know a lot of people all over the world have been affected by the recent recession. Some people have lost their jobs, others have lost their homes. The man in this article on Reuters.com managed to find an interesting way out of his unemployment.
The article has a great title, too. It mentions that the man is selling the shirt on his back. In this case, they mean that he is selling advertising space on his t-shirt however, we often use the expression ‘the shirt on your back‘ to mean the last thing you own. For example, we could say ‘They took everything, right dwon to the shirt on my back‘ meaning that they took everything I own.
There’s an interesting expression in the third paragraph, too. Jason Sadler’s business is described as a ‘human billboard‘ service. A ‘billboard‘ is a space to display adverts.
A little later on, it is mentioned that Sadler sells the day’s adverts at ‘face value‘. I think the expression is explained well in the article. We often use ‘face value‘ in another way, though. We use it to talk about the impression we get from something after only looking at it for a short time. If you take an article at ‘face value‘, you just read the content but don’t try to get any deeper meaning from it.
Further on in the article, we can see the phrasal verb ‘sell out‘. This means when you have sold all of your stock or, in this case, advertising space.
What have you been doing to help get through the recession?
Today’s image is by Adrian Gtz.