{"id":11151,"date":"2015-04-21T12:27:34","date_gmt":"2015-04-21T11:27:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=11151"},"modified":"2015-04-21T12:27:34","modified_gmt":"2015-04-21T11:27:34","slug":"closing-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=11151","title":{"rendered":"Closing out"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the Czech lessons I&#8217;ve been working my way through I&#8217;ve noticed that the Czech host says (in English) at the end of each lesson &#8220;To close out this lesson, we would like to practise what you have just learnt.&#8221;. I would say finish rather than close out, and thought close out was a non-native usage. However recently I heard American friends using the same expression, so it seems that it is used in American English.<\/p>\n<p>According to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.merriam-webster.com\/dictionary\/close%20out\">Merriam-Webster dictionary<\/a>, <strong>to close out<\/strong> is defined as:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8211; exclude; preclude <close out his chances\n- to dispose of a whole stock of by sale; to dispose of (a business); to sell; to put (an account) in order for disposal or transfer\n- to bring to an often rapid or abrupt conclusion;  to discontinue operation of\n- to sell out a business\n- to buy or sell securities or commodities in order to terminate an account<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/close><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So it does exist as an expression, but the meaning doesn&#8217;t quite fit with finishing a lesson.<\/p>\n<p>Do you use or have you heard this expression?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the Czech lessons I&#8217;ve been working my way through I&#8217;ve noticed that the Czech host says (in English) at the end of each lesson &#8220;To close out this lesson, we would like to practise what you have just learnt.&#8221;. I would say finish rather than close out, and thought close out was a non-native [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99,104,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-czech","category-english","category-language","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}