In the dark

In the dark

Today’s English expression is “in the dark.” To be “in the dark” about a situation is to not know anything about what’s going on.

Imagine owning a luxury mansion in another country and not being able to go see it. Imagine, also, that you’re subject to sanctions, so you can’t hire people to check on your property. Probably your family isn’t allowed to travel. You might be feeling a little bit in the dark. You might be feeling like you do not know what’s going on.

Indeed, they didn’t know what was going on. Because some unlucky business and government leaders in Venezuela were the targets of a daring real estate scam . While they were in Venezuela, scammers in Florida were living in their houses, driving their vehicles, and faking their identities. The true owners were in the dark the whole time; the true owners didn’t know anything about what was going on.

You can say, “I was in the dark about” something. People complain about being in the dark at work all the time. Office politics, right? “I was in the dark about JR’s new project to redesign the web site.” That means, I wasn’t involved in JR’s new project to redesign the web site.

Another common way to use “in the dark” is to say, “keep someone in the dark.” To keep someone in the dark is to purposely not tell that person what’s going on, to purposely not let them have the information they need.

Oh, here’s a good example. Sometimes a young couple will move in together, but they don’t really want their parents to know that they’re living together. So they kind of fake it…they say they’re living with roommates or alone or something. They keep their parents in the dark about their living situation. This really only works if you’re not in the same city, right?

FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange, recently collapsed. The founder, Sam Bankman Fried, and a small number of other executives knew they were using customer deposits to make risky investment bets. In simple terms, customers deposited money on the exchange, thinking the exchange would keep them safe. Instead, the exchange took their money and lost it on risky bets. Oops.

We’re still learning the details. But most employees at FTX were in the dark. The founder and a very small number of people at the top kept everyone else in the dark. They hid that information from everyone else in the company. They kept everyone else in the dark.

JR’s song of the week

Now it’s time for JR’s song of the week. It’s “Fly by Midnight” by Automatic, featuring Jake Miller. Here’s the line I like from that song. It says, It feels like “I’m on a waitlist for someone to really know me.”

The song to listen to today is “Fly by Midnight” by Automatic, featuring Jake Miller. Thanks, JR for that one.

See you next time!

That’s all for today. Congratulations on reaching the end of today’s lesson. This was number 529, so the full lesson is at PlainEnglish.com/529.

Now a quick note. We are going to do something a little different over the holidays this year, which is that we’ll have four lessons that are not really about trending topics. This is going to allow the whole Plain English team to have some flexibility over the holidays. So we’ll do four holiday special lessons. They’re going to be the same format as normal, but the topics will be a little more fun, a little more general. We’re going to prepare them in advance, and that will let us all manage the holiday schedule a little easier. And I hope you like them, too.

So the holiday special lessons will go from December 22 to January 2. That will give us a break, but I don’t want you to have to think about anything too difficult over the holidays, so they won’t be too much work for you either. Deal?

All right—that’s it for today. See you Monday; have a great weekend.