Transcript

Hi everyone, welcome to this new French video.

I hope you're settling in well. Don't forget that if you need it, you can activate English or French subtitles.

Today, we're going to take a look at a French expression in just a few minutes. The expression is être à l'ouest.

West, you heard right, refers to the cardinal point. North, south, east, west. The points of the compass.

When you say you're in the west, you're not physically facing west. You don't need a compass to check that you're in the west.

It's an expression that means you're a bit in the moon. You're a bit in your head, out of touch with reality.

If you're physically present, in your head you're a little elsewhere. It's a colloquial expression. It's used in two main contexts. The first, as I was saying, is when you're in your own thoughts, not focused on the situation you're experiencing.

You're awake, but you're kind of dreaming. For example, if you're in a meeting at work and I'm sure it's happened to you before. It used to happen to me all the time. You're at this meeting and you start to drift off into your own thoughts and stop paying attention to what's going on.

And someone is going to ask you "ah and you, what do you think?" Then you'll have to say you weren't paying attention, and ask them to repeat it. And your colleague might say you're completely out of it, or you look a bit out of it.

Of course, as I said, it's a rather colloquial expression, so it also depends on your work context, but in any case, you were out of it. That's for sure.

Like I said, you weren't focused. You weren't paying attention.

The expression can also be used to refer to someone who's off the mark, to use another very colloquial expression.

When someone is out of touch or out of the loop, we can use it to say that someone is out of touch with reality. So it's not necessarily a specific moment. As I was saying, someone who's in their own thoughts is usually someone who's not too aware of realities.

For example, if someone says to me I'd like to buy a 100 square meter apartment in Paris, I've got a budget of 200,000 euros, so I could tell them you're completely off the mark. These prices don't reflect reality at all.

He's out of touch with reality.

That's it for that expression. I hope you liked it and understood it. Let me know in the comments if there are any other French expressions you'd like me to explain.

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I'll see you very, very soon.