44) Bones

Hello and welcome to Learning English with Lyrics. I am your host Jake, and today we are discussing the song "Bones" by Imagine Dragons. I apologize that we didn't have an episode last week, it was a crazy busy week!

Let's get going!

The line I want to talk about today is in the first verse. "Wait until the reaper takes my life". This is a fun one, if a bit dark.

What exactly is "the reaper" in this sentence? Well, normally, a reaper is someone or something that "reaps". That's not very helpful though, what does it mean to reap? Well in order to understand the verb "to reap",  now we need to talk a bit about farms, and the language around them!

Farmers are people that live on farms...yeah, sometimes English can be that easy. Farms are places where plants are grown for food. These plants are called "crops". First, a farmer has to "plant" their crops. They take seeds, and they place them into the ground. This action is called "planting" or "sowing".

Once the crops are planted, they sit in the ground for a while, and then they start growing. The farmer gives them water to help them grow. Naturally, this is called "watering" the plants. So now we have: "The farmer on the farm plants plants and then waters them with water."

Still following okay?

Once the plants have grown, it's time for the harvest! This is when the farmer take the plants out of the ground, so that they can be eaten!

Some plants are pulled out of the ground. Others, are cut down. This process of cutting down plants is called...reaping!

So to reap, means to cut down a plant.

A very famous expression in English is "You reap what you sow". In other words, you're going to harvest whatever you have planted in the ground. While that is the literal meaning, there is a figurative meaning as well. Can you figure out what it means?

Let's get back to our song.

Who is "the reaper".

Well, now we know, that a reaper is someone or something that reaps. Normally they reap plants.

In this case however, we're not talking about plants. In fact...we're talking about people.

The "reaper" in this case, is a reference to a character called "The Grim Reaper". The Grim Reaper is a personification of death. That is to say, The Grim Reaper is a person who represents death. He's often pictured as wearing a big dark cloak, and carrying a tool that's used for harvesting crops.

But his job isn't to harvest crops! His job is to harvest souls! Pretty spooky stuff.

So when the singer says "Wait until the reaper takes my life", he's talking about dying. To "take someone's life" means to kill them. He's not saying that the Grim Reaper is real or anything like that. He's just simply talking about the moment he dies...however that happens.

Well, that's all we have for today, I hope that wasn't too depressing! I'll talk to you soon.