Dining in the Dark

Greetings, one and all!

Just like James, I’m afraid I’m going to have to write a very quick blog today, as I’ve just got home from work and I have just a few minutes to change my clothes and go out again. I’m going out for dinner with a few friends tonight, to an unusual restaurant called ‘Dans le Noir’, which (as all you French speakers out there already know) means ‘In the Dark’. This restaurant is unusual because apparently the food is served to the diners in absolute pitch darkness, so you can’t see what you’re eating. I’ve never been to a place like this before, so I don’t really know what to expect, but what the heck, it sounds like fun to me (though I’ll probably have to get my suit cleaned afterwards).

In the meantime, I’d like to doff my cap to Maru from Argentina, Nia Komalafuri from Jakarta, Kirsti from Finland/France, Clara from Romania, Leila from Finland, Adriana from Brazil and Ha_na from Paris, all of whom took up the gauntlet and translated jokes from their languages into English. Well done guys! Some of the jokes were good, some were not so good, some were downright awful, but I enjoyed reading them all.

James, your blog today was excellent. Yes, it was short, but it was very accurately written; I noticed very few grammatical errors as I read it, and it certainly wasn’t ‘torture’. I’m impressed! And thanks for the picture of the Taipei 101 tower. Architecturally, it looks completely different from anything I’ve seen in Europe, and the clouds in the picture make it look all the more intriguing. Did you take the picture yourself?

I asked you all about the grammar of the sentence,

‘…but I’m sure that by next year I will have forgotten again.’

As James and several other readers said, will have forgotten is the future perfect simple tense. James gave us another nice example of this tense:

‘James will have finished his homework by ten o'clock this evening.’

Nice one!

OK, that’s all for today folks, I’m going to go and put my suit on, so I can spill food all over it. More from me on Friday!

All the best,

Alex



And here’s today’s vocabulary:

We use the adverb apparently when we want to make it clear that we’ve heard this information, but we don’t know for certain that it’s true. In this case, I’ve been told that the dining-room in this restaurant is completely dark, but I’ve never been there so I don’t know for certain yet. I’ll know in a couple of hours!

The verb ‘to dine’ means ‘to have a meal’; it’s a formal word, and it’s often used when talking about restaurants. Therefore a diner is a person who’s having a meal, normally in a restaurant. Be careful not to confuse this word with the word ‘dinner’, which is the name of the meal.

‘Pitch darkness’ means complete, absolute, total darkness.

To doff your cap is a rather old-fashioned way of saying ‘to take off your hat’. As I discussed a little while ago, if I say, ‘I take off my hat to you,’ or, ‘I doff my cap to you,’ it means that I want to express respect to you.

Next, here’s another old-fashioned phrase which has survived in contemporary English. To take up the gauntlet means to accept a challenge.

The adverb downright means ‘completely’ or ‘absolutely’. It’s normally used with negative adverbs, so we might say, ‘downright terrible,’’downright disgusting’, etc.

The adjective ‘intriguing’ combined the meanings of ‘interesting’ and ‘mysterious’.

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