 Hi students, it's Shayna, your teacher from espressoenglish.net. Are you ready for another phrasal verbs lesson? Today we're going to look at the phrasal verb mess around, all right? As a reminder, if you want to get a lot more lessons on phrasal verbs, then join my course, phrasal verbs in conversation, because it's another great way to learn these phrasal verbs in context, right? Because that will make them a lot more memorable instead of just studying lists and definitions. I want you to see how these phrasal verbs are used so that you can remember them and use them yourself, all right? For more information on that, check out the link in the top right corner of this video or in the video description. So mess around. What does it mean? Here are the three options. Remember only one of these definitions is correct. I'm going to tell you the definitions, and then I'm going to give you an example of the phrasal verb mess around. And I want you to guess the correct meaning out of these three options. So option A, do random things, not be serious. Option B, to make a place disorganized, or option C, do something incorrectly, all right? Only one of these is correct. Let's look at an example. Let's imagine that you have two teenage children. So teenage means that they are 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, or 19 years old, okay? So you have two teenagers. And let's imagine that you cooked a big dinner for the whole family. And after dinner, you are kind of tired because you spent all that time cooking. And so you ask your teenagers to please clean up and wash the dishes and put everything away in the refrigerator and so on so that you can relax. And you leave the kitchen. Now one hour later, you go back to the kitchen to get a drink of water, and you see that the kitchen is not yet clean. The dishes haven't been washed, and your teenage kids are joking with each other, and they're on their cell phones, playing games, and chatting with friends, and the work hasn't gotten done. So you tell them, hey, stop messing around and clean up the kitchen, please. You expected that it would have been clean after an hour, but because they were talking and chatting and playing on their cell phones, it didn't get done. Stop messing around and clean up the kitchen, please. So based on that example, which one of these definitions is correct for the phrasal verb mess around? Leave a comment with your answer, and I'll tell you in just a moment. The correct definition for mess around is to do random things and not be serious, okay? So in this example, instead of doing the serious task of cleaning up the kitchen, the teenagers were doing other things, random things that had nothing to do with their task. They were talking, they were joking around, they were on their cell phones. Those things are random. They are not related to the serious task that they need to do. So that's what it means to mess around, to do a whole bunch of different things that are not serious and usually not related to what you really need to do. Let's see if you can use mess around in a sentence. I'll give you another example from my own life. So sometimes when I sit down at my computer to work on espresso English and to record a video or write a new lesson, sometimes before I start my work, I mess around a little bit on the computer. So that means I check Facebook and maybe I read some news and I check my personal email and I spend maybe 10 or 15 minutes messing around doing all these random things that are not related to my serious task, which is doing work. So can you use this phrasal verb in a sentence? Write about a time when you messed around or when you saw someone else messing around. Leave a comment and try to use this phrasal verb. When you try to use it, it will help you remember it better. If you want more phrasal verb lessons with practice exercises that will help you use the phrasal verbs in your own English, again, check out my phrasal verbs in conversation course. At the end of each lesson, there are some questions with short answers where you can write an answer using the phrasal verbs you learned in that lesson. So it's a great way to put this new vocabulary into practice immediately. I hope to see you in the course and I hope you're enjoying these daily phrasal verbs lessons. That's all for today. I'll see you next time.