The World Cup is a big event!
The English Idiom “All over the place” has 2 meanings that you will learn how to use in this blog post.
All over the place – meaning #1
① everywhere; over a great distance or area.
“Starbucks has become very popular in Tokyo. New cafes are opening all over the place.”
= There are Starbucks cafes everywhere now.
“As my friends got older they moved away from my hometown. Now they’re all over the place and I don’t see them much.”
= My friends live a great distance from me (far away and in different places)
All over the place – meaning #2
② not neat; not well organized
“Your desk is a mess! You’ve got files all over the place. How can you find anything?”
= Your desk is not clean, it must be difficult to find a specific file.
“Trevor’s presentation was hard to follow. His ideas were all over the place.”
= His ideas were not organized well, his presentation was not clear.
For meaning ① the word place has a general feeling, it means everywhere. It’s also okay to use a specific area name instead of the word place. Remember my first example:
In this sentence, instead of saying the place I said the country. The feeling is the same but the place is not so general, it means Russia. The matches will be played all over Russia.”
Please look at these other examples:
“Starbucks has become very popular in Tokyo. New cafes are opening all over the city.”
“As my friends got older they moved away from my hometown. Now they’re all over the state and I don’t see them much.”
For meaning ② all over the place can also be used to describe a state of mind (the condition of your mind) to mean confused or unclear. Often someone is thinking about too many things at once, and they can’t to focus.
A: “Dave, did you hear what I just said?”
B: “Sorry I missed it. My mind is all over the place today.”
= It’s hard to focus so I didn’t hear what you said.
Special thanks to https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/all+over+the+place for their useful idiom definition!
All FIFA 2018 World Cup information from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_FIFA_World_Cup
Pingback: The English verb CHEER (use it 3 different ways!) - World English Blog