Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles Hi this is Tutor Nick P and this is Adjective Phrase 5. The adjective phrase today is filthy rich. Okay. Let's look at the note here. If someone is filthy rich, he or she is extremely rich. The origin of the term seems to go back to the 14th century. At that time lucre used to mean money and famous authors at that time such as Chaucer and John Wycliffe used to use terms such as foul lucre or filthy lucre to refer to somebody who became rich through dishonorable means. You know, by behavior that you might not consider to be completely moral. So dishonorable means. Dishonorable ways, methods of getting rich. Okay. Let's continue. It became popular in the US during the late 1920s, after the stock market crash which was really not until 1929 and the rich were exploiting those who had to sell their homes at unreasonably low prices in order to survive during the economic crash. So these people became very, very poor. And of course since everybody's poor. The value of houses fell down and these rich people went around , and they were getting great buys on buying up all these houses that were like far below the normal market price at that time. mm-hmm Okay. Okay good. Phrase, sold the homes for basically low prices. Yes. . As time went on, the phrase softened. So it wasn't as harsh. Softened to just mean extremely rich with just a slight, just a small implication of dishonourable wealth. Okay. So let's take a look at some examples here. Example number one. He used to come from a filthy rich family, but after he inherited his share , he gambled all away. So maybe at one point his family was filthy rich but then he, he squandered his money. All right. Let's look at number two. The Rothschilds are a filthy rich family and there are many who believe they became that way through ill-gotten gains. So yeah they were rich banking family and they might have been one of the ones like buying up those houses before. I think one of the Rothschilds used to have that that old quote. he said you know, ' The time to buy is when there's blood in the street or when they're dropping bombs or something like that. So always when times are really really bad and people are desperate. That's the time you get the lowest prices. So he might have been one of the ones that they were talking about. Let's look at number three. Jack became filthy rich after investing in crypto currencies when they were, when they used to be just pennies for a Bitcoin. Yeah. if you haven't thrown like a thousand or a few thousand dollars at Bitcoin at that time. If you were brave enough to do that. You'd be a multimillionaire today. So you could you could have become filthy rich. Anyway. I hope it's clear. I hope you got it. Thank you for your time. Bye-bye.
B1 US rich filthy phrase adjective family buying English Tutor Nick P Adjective Phrase (5) Filthy Rich 13 1 anitawu12 posted on 2019/04/27 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary