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Reader question: Please explain “last time I checked” in this conversation: A: Yep, last time I checked, Barack Obama is still a socialist. B: Can’t agree more. In other words, the sun is expected to rise tomorrow morning. My comments: “Last time I checked” is a cliché, one that is more or less meaningless but decidedly overused in conversation. It practically means nothing and yet is very useful. It means practically nothing because if you take these words out, the point being made is just as clear, that, here, Obama is a socialist. Yet the phrase is very useful because it is sometimes effective as a point of emphasis. Here, it is used for emphasis and perhaps with a bit of sarcasm, making it sound as if, as Person B concurs, that the fact that Obama is “still a socialist” is as true as “the sun is expected to rise tomorrow morning.” At any rate, this phrase is very useful to the foreign language learner. Meaningless clichés like this is, as it were, idiomatic and therefore good English. I remember when I first visited America for further journalist studies back in 1989, I and my fellow students from China were invited to introduce ourselves to people from other places in class. I could only speak a little broken English, and haltingly, which was only natural, but I was able to sprinkle my short speech with things like “you know” and “as a matter of fact”. | 
