Blown off course

To be blown off course

Today’s expression is “to be blown off course.”

There are a few parts to it, so let’s take it one by one. “Course” is a word that can describe your planned path , your planned route . In the physical world, we would most often use this in the sky or in the water.

The sky or the water—so you would use “course” when there is no set road or path. If I drive from my house to the grocery store , I would follow a road. Or, at least I would if I had a car! But if I were sailing a ship from one island to another…there is no road. That’s when we would use the word “course.”

So if you’re sailing a sailboat, and you’re going from one island to another, you would decide on a course. How are we going to get there? You would use a compass , you would use visual landmarks , a map, maybe today you would use GPS to help set the course. How are we getting from one island to the next?

So you set sail and you start following the course. And an hour later, you check the compass, you check the landmarks, you check the GPS, and you find out that you are no longer following the course that you originally planned. If that’s the case, you have been blown off course. The wind blew the sailboat in a direction that you had not planned to go.

The other place something can be blown off course is in the sky. Just like on the open seas , there are no roads in the sky. Modern, commercial airplanes don’t get blown off course because they have lots of GPS and navigation equipment that help keep them on their flight path. But wind can affect a smaller airplane—or anything else that doesn’t have much control over its direction.

The Indonesian navy was conducting a parachuting drill at an air base. Just as a parachuter was floating down through the air, a burst of wind blew him off course. He was trying to land at an air force base. But the wind blew him off course: instead of landing at the air force base, he landed in someone’s backyard ten kilometers away. He was uninjured .

This reminded Asian viewers of a popular Korean television drama called “Crash Landing on You.” In that series, which is available on Netflix, a beautiful South Korean heiress goes parasailing . But a gust of wind blows her off course and she lands in North Korea, a brutal dictatorship . North and South Korea are technically at war, and relations between the two are strained . In the series, the South Korean heiress encounters a North Korean soldier and falls in love with him.

America and China were not exchanging love letters after a balloon of Chinese origin floated over sensitive military sites in the United States . China says the balloon was used for weather research and it was blown off course.

The explanation is that China was doing meteorological research in the Pacific, and that the wind accidentally took this balloon—which was being used for purely civilian , innocent, scientific research —the wind blew this balloon off course and the balloon and all its sensors happened to float over nuclear weapons silos of China’s geopolitical rival . There is no way to know for sure. But if that is what really happened, then the wind has a cruel sense of humor .

Quote of the Week

Time for a quick quote of the week. It’s from Michelangelo, the Italian Renaissance man, an architect, sculptor, painter, and poet. He said: “ Genius is eternal patience .”

It took four years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican City, so Michelangelo knows whereof he speaks. “Genius is eternal patience.”

See you next time!

By the way, I have seen “Crash Landing on You.” It was cute. I liked it. There was a time when Netflix was buying up a lot of Korean stuff. And that show was a real hit in Asia, but it never really caught on in other regions. I liked it though, “Crash Landing on You,” the beautiful heiress to a department store fortune is blown off course during a parasailing trip, lands in North Korea, and falls in love with an enemy soldier.

All right, that’s all for today, March 6, 2023. This was lesson number 552, so you can listen to the full content at PlainEnglish.com/552.

Coming up on Thursday: Titanic, the movie, 25 years later. I saw the re-released 3-D version in theaters. And so this is a good time to look back on the movie’s impact. That’s coming up on Thursday. See you then.