Contest! Meaning of 'I had a very good year that day'

English as a Second Language What do you want to talk about?
1

Yesterday I heard a man say this sentence:

Can you guess what he meant? The winner of the contest wins the distinction of having won the contest. :slight_smile:

2

Hi Jamie,
I come from Bulgaria and in my country you can hear this sentence very often, especially in small villages where elderly people run their small farms. There is a saying here that “a day feeds a year”. Lets’ say that exactly in the middle of March they have to sow their field, and if this day (when they have to do it) turns out to be a cold one and the soil is still frozen or something unfavourable like that (I’m not an expert :slight_smile: ), they can’t do it and have to wait for a better time. This delay, though, results in a very bad harvest afterwards, respectively a bad year for them because this is how they make a living. So, in situations like this you can hear “I had a very bad year that day.” or “I had a very good year that day.”
Well, if that man happened to be Bulgarian, consider me a winner of the contest :slight_smile: but I doubt it.
Anyway, I had fun sharing this with you!
Have a great day!

3

Daniela’s version seems quite plausible to me. I found it very interesting, by the way.

But I’ll suggest another definition: could it mean that he played well or got a very good score in a competition/play/game? Or maybe he won the lottery? The first thing that crossed my mind was the expression ‘it made my day’, but now I don’t think it means exactly the same.

Quizzes are fun. Have you got any more :slight_smile: ?

4

Daniela wins the contest! Congratulations!

The man wasn’t a farmer, but he was a stock options trader. A stock options trader can be wrong in his predictions of the price movement of various stocks, so he loses money more often than he gains money, but one or two good choices can earn him enough money to cancel out his losses. One day’s earnings can make him more income than people usually make in an entire year. So, maybe he loses smaller amounts of money 60% of the time, but on one day when he’s very, very right, he can make a few million dollars. So, on one day he made so much money that he wouldn’t have had to work for the rest of the year, if he didn’t want to.

5

Hi Jamie,
It only comes to show that it IS a small world indeed. No matter if you are a farmer in Bulgaria or a stock options trader in the US, they all seem to speak one and the same language. Isn’ it a magic?

6

Yes! It’s true magic. Sometimes Czech people accuse me of speaking “Czenglish” when I use an English idiom that just happens to be exactly the same in Czech. They often don’t believe it.