At the crack of the dawn..

At the crack of dawn, Indian fighter jets took off from the airbase and made mincemeat of several Pakistani tanks

Improving your English speaking is an easy and interesting task. You don’t have to get up at the crack of dawn and do intricate yogic movements and neither do you have to read books after books of grammar rules, vocabulary lists. All you need to do is to find smart and fun ways to keep learning everyday, like joining BodhiSutra English speaking on Phone page on Facebook!!!

“At the crack of dawn” is a fairly straightforward phrase – if you know the meaning of dawn, you’d probably guess it quite easily that it means at the first light of the day. Used essentially to denote something that happened as soon as the morning dawned, it carries a certain sense of urgency and energy.

Let’s take some examples:

1. At the crack of dawn, Indian fighter jets flew up in the desert sky and decimated scores of Pakistani tanks. It was a fitting conclusion to the historic battle of Longewal where a handful of Indian soldiers had stopped a huge Pakistani formation of tanks for the whole night. Bollywood potboiler Border was based on this incident.
2. Get up at the crack of dawn, get ready and run for five kilometers. Then come back, have a glass of milk and go back to the gym. Exercise for 45 minutes.
3. He alaways gets up at the crack of dawn, exercises for an hour and then gets ready by 8 o’clock.

You’d find the phrase mostly used in a positive sense – in an appreciative tone. As it is, the imagery of the moment of first light of the day has a lot of inherent positivity.

Let’s take some more examples:

1. The trekking plan and equipment is ready. We will leave at the crack of dawn.
2. We were planning to leave at the crack of dawn but it snowed heavily during the night. The trekking routes became inaccessible and we had to abandon our plans.