She does that with "everybody"

English as a Second Language
1

Hi

I can’t believe she has been talking bad about me.
I wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. She does that with everybody.

I have watched the above dialogue. I am wondering what “everyone” refers to.
.

(1) everyone is people who she talks badly with about someone, whenever she meet new ones. I mean they are listeners ?

Or

(2) everyone is people who she talks badly about. I mean they are the targets she want to speak ill of?

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2

It’s option number 2 and it means that the person in question usually talks behind other people’s backs. Where exactly did you watch or hear that dialogue?

Oh, and welcome to our forum :wink:

Regards,
Torsten

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3

Continuing the discussion from She does that with "everybody":

Dear Torsten

Thank you for your warm welcome! You are so nice of me :wink:
To begin with, that dialogue mentioned is everything. It is just short one in my speaking class.

I have two further questions.
Q1. What is meaning of “with” in this dialogue?
Is it the following meaning from Collins?

image
image710×150 18.3 KB

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Q2. Would it be better to use preposition “about”?

She does that “about” everybody.

.

PS: Where is enter button for reply? Do I have to push [Ctrl + Enter] key so that I can reply? I don’t know how to upload my reply. It is a miracle. :cry:

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4

Hi again, when you learn a language you need to learn entire phrases such as collocations, idioms and sentences instead of isolated words. It’s impossible to learn all the meanings of a preposition by just reading the definition of that preposition.

Instead, you should try to make sense of the entire phrase:

to do something with somebody

Or even better, look the entire phrase up in the National Corpus and/or on Google and see in what contexts it is used.

Please let me know if this makes sense.

PS: You post your reply just by hitting the blue ‘Reply’ button as you have done before.

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5

Hi, again! Good morning, I hope you have a good day!

Hmm Yeap I know English’s specific characteristics. Collocations are a good case.
For example)
• I am satisfied with the way you make my hair style.
• I am good at swimming.
• I am swamped with a lot of work.
• I regard her as a good teacher
etc…

Before I asked it, I already looked up “to do something with someone else”.

→ However none of phrasal verbs would apply to this dialogue.

.

Also I have tried to figure out this “with” through my favorite websites like,
image
(The above websites are things I usually use to refer to native speaker’s good ceases.)
→ But I was not able to do find any good sentence using this kind of “with”

.
Anyway, based on the following definitions. Actually both are similar.
1-Collins’s 7th definition
You use with to indicate what a state, quality, or action relates to, involves, or affects.

2-Macmillan’s 14th definition
used for saying what a particular action or problem is related to

I have understood as below.
She did talking bad with everyone
→ Everyone is people related to her talking bad(AN ACTION), and they are targets who she speaks ill of

Do I understand right?

P:S: I noticed there is blue button “Reply” which is from time to time hidden by advertising banner. :sweat_smile:

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6

Where did you find this phrase?

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7

Ah, I mean, I understand the thing like this.

She does that(=talking bad/badly) with(=about) everybody.

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8

Yes, you understand that correctly.

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