Be Bold. 'Break the Mold'!
About this episode
The speaker introduces the concept of using molds to create identical objects and contrasts this with shaping items by hand.
Transcript
And now, words and their stories from VOA Learning English.
Today we talk about making things.
When you make things using a mold, the material takes the shape of the mold, and everything comes out the same.
So if you have a mold of a duck, and put clay inside it, you will have a lot of ducks made out of clay with the same shape.
They will look exactly like each other.
Now, if you break the mold, you have to shape the clay by hand to make one duck at a time.
As a result, all of the handmade ducks will look different.
Each one is special and unique.
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That is where we get the expression "to break the mold."
The dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster says to break the mold means you do something in a completely new way.
Those who break the mold usually try to find new ways to deal with a problem.
They do things differently from what has been done before.
They try new methods and do not follow what is usually done.
We also call these new ways and methods fresh, one of a kind, or novel.
For example, after a toy company lost money for three straight years, the owner tried something completely different.
She asked young children to develop new toys for the company.
And it worked, the new toy sold very well, so we say she broke the mold of toy development, by asking children instead of experts to design new toys for the company.
We also use this expression to break the mold to describe a very unusual or admired person.
Let's look at the story of Barack Obama, the forty fourth president of the United States.
His father was a black man from Kenya, his mother was a white American from the midwestern state of Kansas.
By two thousand and nine, only five black Americans had ever served in the U. S. Senate.
Yet Obama defeated all other well known candidates to become the first black American president in the country's history.
Even those who did not vote for Obama agreed that he broke the mold.
The expression is usually used to praise someone, but people sometimes use it to describe someone a bit unusual as well.
Used this way, we might say, "Well, they certainly broke the mold when they made her."
And that's the end of this Words in Their Stories.
Do you have a similar expression in your language, or do you have an expression or idiom you would like us to explain?
Send us an email at learningenglish at voanews. com.
Until next time, I'm Anna Matteo.
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Audio and English text: VOA Learning English, a work of the U.S. government in the public domain. DeepListen arranged the transcript sentence by sentence. VOA has no partnership with DeepListen and does not endorse it.
Source: VOA Learning English (public domain).