For my final blog entry of 2015, I’d like to write about the idiom “talk someone’s ear off”. We use it when we want to talk about a person who is talking a lot to another person. Let me give you some ways to use it in sentences.
Don’t sit with Betty at the party. She’ll talk your ear off all night.
Peter is a very talkative person. He can talk anyone’s ear off.
I asked my teacher a simple question about my assignment, and he talked my ear off for the next hour.
My mother has changed a lot. When she was younger, she used to talk my father’s ear off, but now she’s extremely quiet. I wonder why she changed.
We usually use this expression in grammatically positive sentences.
This expression is a bit negative in tone. The feeling is that the person is talking too much, and the other person doesn’t like it so much. However, please note that it’s not extremely negative; just a little bit.
Please note that we don’t put an “s” at the end of “ear” if there is just one person who is being talked to. However, if there is more than one person who is listening, we add an “s”. For example: “The professor talked the ears off the students in his class.”
We can use this in casual business situations, but it’s not usually used in formal situations.
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