[파워잉글리쉬] 5월 1일자 (월) 

The Tablecloth Trick

An embarrassing incident at a lunch restaurant made Denise run outside while her friend Marion paid the bill. 

The problem occurred when Denise got up from the table and was followed by something.

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Marion : Are you okay? You turned beet red in there.

Denise : No, I'm not. Let's get on the first bus that comes. I don't think I'll ever live that down.

Marion : Don't worry about it. There are plenty of other restaurants in this city.

Denise : It was all that waiter could do to stifle his laughter.

Marion : So, how did our tablecloth get caught in your belt, anyway?

Denise : <sigh> I thought I was tucking my napkin into my waist.

 Everyone in there probably thinks I'm some yokel who'd never set eyes on a restaurant with tablecloths before.

Marion : Well, they didn't charge me much for the broken dishes, and I owed you some money anyway.

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Please click the button below to check out the translation of the above dialog.

Useful Expressions

1. turn beet red 

(to blush heavily due to embarrassment) 

2. live something down 

(to overcome the shame or embarrassment of something)

3. be all one can do

(to be achieved only with great effort; no more is possible)

4. stifle

(to stop a breath, cough, laugh, etc)

5. yokel

(a naive person from a rural area)

Power Expression

★ 나는 전에 식탁보가 있는 식당을 본 적이 없어.

To my blog visitors,

This is my first time to write and upload PE Dialog on my blog.

Recently I felt that I am getting lazy studying English. So, I made a rule to upload PE dialog in a regular way.

I hope this is good for me and your second-language learning.

Thank you. 

Perennial emblem of home

FIREPLACE

Fire and human dwelling were inseparable in most climates until recently and the fireplace or hearth-source of heat and means of cooking-has been seen by many as the beginning of architecture. Fire was both practical necessity and social focus and the earliest known houses had fireplaces in the form of an open pit built into the ground.

The smoke from such fires would escape inefficiently through holes in the roof. Despite the development of chimneys and cetral heating these early fire pits remained in use in rural houses well into the nineteenth century.

The Romans used ceramic tubes inside walls to draw smoke out of bakeries, but true chimneys-tall structures designed to draw gases and smoke up from the fire and disperse them into the atmosphere-dis not emerge in Europe until the twelfth century. By the seventeenth century the chimney had become such an important feature that houses were frequently built around it, with a centural stack acting as a supporting structure for one or more dwellings. In the late eighteeth century Count Rumford designed a fireplace with a tall, shallow firebox that was better at drawing the smoke up and out of the building and greatly improved the amount of radiant heat projected into the room. His design became the model for modern fireplaces.

Architecturally, the fireplace's focal role in a house or room, combined with the desirability of a fireproof surround, was celebrated with elaborately carved openings and surrounds. French Chateux such as Blois, Chambord and Fontainebleau(opposite) are known for the size and artistry of their chimneypieces, while in the  Baroque and Rococo periods fireplaces were usually smaller but richer in decoration. The proliferation of fireplaces generated the picturesque roofscapes of great houses such as Burleigh in England, and socially its implications were even more significant: providing fireplaces throughout a dwelling made possible "a room of one's own," and the development of the modern sense of privacy and individuality.

Few modern homes have open fireplaces, due to the convenience of cetral heating and regulations on emissions, but gas fires and wood burners are still valued as a means of offering the ambience of a "real" fire. The fireplace, rather surprisingly, was valued by Le Corbusier as a powerful emblem of home, and evne in his Unites d'Habitation he saw such a "sacred" focus as essential for a family "even if," as he put it, "the 'fire' comes courtesy of electricity." In Alto's Villa Mairea, heated by a form of air conditioning, a large white-plastered fireplace dominates the living spaces, recalling vernacular models. Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie houses were organized around a central fire and the later, and cheaper, Usonian houses, which had underfloor heating, similarly featured a focal fireplace that Wright considered "the psychological center of the home." In grander houses such as Fallingwater and Wingspread, a large chimney became the core around which Wright wrapped the entire dwelling, and a central fireplace and chimney were also famously deployed, with more than a trace of irony, in Robert Venturi's "Mother's House": built for his mother in suburban Philadelphia in 1962 its deliberately "houselike" front was to become one of the most celebrated emblems of Postmodernism.