A funny fragment form an episode of the TV series "Sex and the City", about speed dating (a techinque used to meet many people in a short period of time and decide if you like any of them.

If you only had one minute to introduce yourself to a would-be partner, would you also use it to talk about your profession or social success? Is that what people are interested in?

For Miranda, the only thing worse than being Charlotte's 34-year-old bridesmaid was being a 34-year-old bridesmaid without a date. With the wedding less than a week away, Miranda fell prey to the siren song of a New York singles event: Multi-dating.
$20 bought you seven mini-dates, each eight minutes long which incidentally is about as long as most blind dates should be.
- Hi. I'm Miranda Hobbes.
- Dwight Owens. Private wealth group at Morgan Stanley Investment Management for high net-worth individuals and a couple of pension plans. Like my job, been there five years, divorced, no kids, not religious. I live in New Jersey, speak French and Portuguese, work in Business School. Any of this appealing to you?
- Sure. Portuguese, that's impressive.
- Obrigado. What about you, Mandy?
- Miranda. I'm a lawyer at a mid-sized firm. Actually, I was recently made partner.
- I'm a lawyer.
- I'm a lawyer. I went to Harvard Law School.
- I'm a stewardess.
- Really?

THAN BEING= Remember that after prepositions and conjunctions we use –ING.

BRIDESMAID= A woman who attends the bride at a wedding.

FELL PREY TO= if you fall prey to something you feel really attracted to it (almost like hypnotized).

THE SIREN SONG OF…= The charm of…, the attraction of…
Sirens were strange beings from Greek mythology, half women half birds (or half women half fish, in medieval times) who lived on a little island and sang beautiful songs that hypnotized sailors, so they couldn't help but coming to them and becoming their menu. So if you hear the sirens or the sirens' songs, you are irresistibly attracted to something that you find fascinating.

SINGLES= Unmarried.

MULTI-DATING= (also called speed dating) A fashionable event designed so that singles can find a partner fast and easy. A group of men and women come together in a bar, they have a few minutes to talk to each other. When the time is over they have to change pairs and start again with a new person. At the end, if they liked somebody they write it on a piece of paper. The organisers see if both people like each other, and when that happens, they tell them so that they can have a real private date. If they don't match, you simply never know, so it's not embarrassing and there are no rejections. A DATE is a romantic appointment.

$20 BOUGHT YOU 7 MINI-DATES= If an amount of money buys you something, that means that you can buy that thing for that price. So in this construction we can say COST instead of "bought".

INCIDENTALLY= We use this word inside a sentence (between commas) to add a remark, another detail. The real meaning of it is to add "a little detail", some more information with no importance (almost as if by accident), but very often we also use it to add very important information:
- She bought a new house which, incidentally, is the same colour as mine (the colour is not important, but I wanted to add that information).
- She married a man from Russia but, after making some investigation about him, she found out that the man, incidentally, was really his half-brother! (here the information that he was a relative is very important, but we use "incidentally" to sound unimpressed or to sound sarcastic or funny).

BLIND DATES= A blind date is when you have an appointment with a girl you don't know and haven't seen before.

WEALTH= Riches (lots of money and other material possessions). A WEALTH GROUP is a company whose job is basically to help rich people become richer by administering and investing their moneys in a more efficient way.

NET-WORTH= In personal finance, net worth is used to refer to an individual's net financial position (as opposed to brute position); similarly, it uses the value of all assets minus the value of all liabilities (debt). Do you understand this? I don't.

PENSION PLANS= If you have a pension plan, you usually put some money aside every month and your bank or investing company will invest that money to make it grow. When you are older and retire (stop working forever), you can get the money from your pension plan and live the rest of your live on it. If the government grants you a retirement pay, your pension plan can help you live better. But here, a pension plan is not the money he invests for his retirement, but the product they sell to people who want to have a pension plan with them.

LIKE MY JOB= This LIKE is a verb, so the subject "I" is missing. We still know it's a verb because it is stressed. When it is a preposition it is not stressed. Compare (capital letters mean the syllable is stressed):
- YES,  you KNOW i LIKE JULIE, but SHE doesn't LIKE me.
- NO, i'm not like JULIE, i LIKE meeting PEOple.
- IT's not like YESterday, toDAY it's Different.

BEEN THERE= I've been there.
Dropping the subject and the auxiliary may happen in colloquial conversation, as long as they can easily be inferred by the linguistic or real life context.

NO KIDS, NOT RELIGIOUS= We use NO and NOT in a different way. NO is a negative article (= not any, the opposite of SOME), and NOT is a negative particle used to make a verb negative, so NO is used with nouns and NOT is used with verbs. But yet "kids" is a noun and "religious" is an adjective, so? Well, we have to look at the real complete sentences to see it:
- I have no kids (opposite: I have some kids)
- I'm not religious (opposite: I am religious)
NO goes before the noun, NOT goes after the verb, so if you see NOT before a word, the verb must go before it or it is missing (understood):
- She's coming tomorrow.
- No, not tomorrow, next weekend = No, she's not coming tomorrow, she's coming next weekend. (the first NO in this sentence is not the negative article, it's simply the opposite of YES)

APPEALING= Attractive.
If something is appealing to you, you like it and want to do something about it (have it, buy it, get it, know more about it…)

SURE= (col.) Of course (an emphatic form of YES)

IMPRESSIVE= If something is impressive you are impressed about it, you think it's fantastic.

OBRIGADO= (Portuguese) Thanks.

MID-SIZED= Neither big nor small.

FIRM= Company, enterprise.

PARTNER= If you are a partner in a company, you own part of the company and you also get part of the benefits.

STEWARDESS= A woman flight-attendant, an air hostess (they work on plains to wait on you and make your flight nice and comfortable).