#763 To Hit the Right Note (with transcript)

Today's Idiom to help you learn English is "to hit the right note". Also: Nemo, a Swiss non binary singer wins Eurovision An Archeological dig in Orkney will vanish again into the earth. Full Transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10DkiDmVrdge7ANPL5AcL3vFM0z2ykqlSSm6lMVsW3mI/edit?usp=sharing Transcript Extract: To hit the right note is today's phrase, and that means to do or say something in a way that's incredibly effective or well received.  For example,  His speech really hit the right note with the audience.  The comedian's jokes hit the right note, making everyone laugh.  The restaurant's atmosphere hits the right note for a romantic dinner.  The company's marketing campaign hit the right note, resonating with their audience.  To hit the right note. Now, this is actually very, very common. As you can probably guess, it comes from music because if you think of the keys on a piano, when you play them, you're hitting a note. That just means you're making a particular sound. So if you hit the right note obviously you're following music, which is correct. And if you hit the right note as a metaphor, that simply means that you're creating the right ambience. You're creating the right mood for a particular thing to happen.  Now of course we can use it with anything. The boss hit the right note when he offered the employees a pay rise. But, um, we often use it about music as well. For example, last night in Europe was Eurovision. And somebody called Nemo, that was the entry for Switzerland. He hit the right note. Uh. He won. Now, of course, I'm not directly relating. I'm not directly relating Nemo's performance to hitting the right note. This is a metaphor. Okay, so his music clearly is very good. He hit the right note with his audience and because it is a musical act to say he hit the right note is a nice, meaningful coincidence.  We're going to read the the story about Nemo today… it's a little bit complex. So we're going to go through it slowly. And there's a lot of new words here which will help us to understand more about Nemo and what happened yesterday. So it says here, and this is from The Observer: Switzerland has won the 68th Eurovision Song Contest, ending a fraught and at times tumultuous competition. Swiss singer Nemo, who defines as non-binary, entered the night as the bookmakers third favourite.  Now, if we just look at that one more time, um. A fraught and tumultuous competition, uh, really is just talking about “anxious and confused” I think would be the best way to describe it. Fraught means anxious and tumultuous means confused, maybe disorderly. So, um, this song contest, it says here:  Nemo won the 68th Eurovision Song Contest, ending a fraught that anxious and at times tumultuous disorderly competition.   Swiss singer Nimmo, who defines as non-binary, entered the night as the bookmakers third favourite. Someone who defines as non-binary um means somebody who doesn't easily fit into the category of male or female.  Now, this is becoming fairly common across our media spectrum here.  And there's an increasing number of people who don't feel okay fitting into society's norms of masculine and feminine. This takes many different shapes. So it's impossible for me to define exactly what non-binary is. Um, but what I can tell you is that Nemo does not define himself as male or female, and therefore he uses the pronouns “they” rather than he or she. Now you can hear there the difficulties in talking about non-binary people because of the pronouns. Just a second ago I said “he” doesn't easily fit in, when of course I should immediately have used the pronoun “they”.  So it's very difficult to try to give you a description using the correct pronouns of what a non-binary person is.  Um. Swiss singer Nemo, who defines as non-binary, entered the night as the bookmakers third favourite.