Come into focus

To come into focus

Today’s phrase is “to come into focus.” When something comes into focus, it becomes easier to understand. To understand what I mean by this phrase, imagine you turn on a projector that projects an image onto a screen. We use those a lot at my job, we project our computers onto the wall or onto a screen. But you know how when you just turn one of those on, the image is often blurry? You have to adjust the lens of the projector in order to make the image clearer. You have to adjust the focus.

So that’s why we say something comes into focus when it becomes clear. Black holes are one of the greatest mysteries of the universe. A lot of what we think we know about black holes is still an unproven theory. Einstein is responsible for most of the theories around black holes—and, incidentally, most of what he thought about black holes was confirmed by the images that were released. The images released by scientists don’t contain all the answers to all our questions about black holes, but they do provide a lot of new information. That’s why I said at the beginning of the episode that one of the big mysteries of the universe came into greater focus. It became clearer. We started to learn a lot more about it. Our understanding is still not perfect, but black holes came into greater focus.

When something is a mystery and it starts to become clear, then you say it comes into focus, or comes into greater focus. Here’s an example from the world of technology. For a long time, people speculated that Apple would get into the streaming business by creating a service similar to Netflix. But nobody really knew what they were going to do. Apple’s plans came into focus at a big event, where they explained a lot of what they were planning. Before, nobody knew what was up; after the event, it was clear that Apple was planning to create its own library of shows. It came into focus at that big event.

Here’s another example. In Turkey, as in many countries, they have lots and lots of political parties. It can be hard to know who to vote for when there are so many options and so many differences between them. But in this year’s local elections, the parties made alliances. So while there were many political parties, they grouped themselves loosely into just two big alliances. That brought the choice into focus for many voters. Now the voters were able to make the decision more easily.

I’ll give you an example from sports. It’s the beginning of the baseball season now. We’re only about three weeks into a six-month-long season. It’s way too early to know who are going to be the good teams when the season ends in September. But in baseball, they say that around Memorial Day in the United States—right around the end of May—the playoff picture comes into focus. That means, by the end of May, we start to have a good idea of who are the teams that are good that year, and who are not. Right now, it’s too early to tell—there’s a lot of randomness in baseball. But by the end of May, things will come into focus. We’ll know who’s going to be competitive at the end of the year and who won’t. There will still be some surprises—there always are—but the playoff picture will come into greater focus in another five, six weeks.

That’s all for today! Don’t forget audiobooks at PlainEnglish.com/book , and if any of them are too fast, just slow down the speed to 0.75 and you’ll get it for sure. One free audiobook for any listener to Plain English if you sign up for a free trial, all for you at PlainEnglish.com/book . JR and I will be back on Monday, when we’ll talk about the world’s biggest and most spectacular exercise in democracy.