{"id":304,"date":"2014-06-10T12:28:04","date_gmt":"2014-06-10T10:28:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lingua-franca.de\/blog\/?p=304"},"modified":"2014-06-10T12:28:04","modified_gmt":"2014-06-10T10:28:04","slug":"idiom-60-draw-a-blank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.lingua-franca.de\/blog\/idiom-60-draw-a-blank\/","title":{"rendered":"Idiom 60 &#8211; Draw a blank"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I had to give a presentation to the CEO about the new product we are developing. I was very nervous. He asked me simple questions which I could normally answer with no problems, but because of my nerves I <em>drew a blank (sich nicht erinnern k\u00f6nnen)<\/em>. It really looked like I had no idea what I was talking about.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/a\/af\/Darnley_stage_3.jpg\/220px-Darnley_stage_3.jpg\" alt=\"Darnley stage 3.jpg\" width=\"124\" height=\"181\" data-file-width=\"1581\" data-file-height=\"2313\" \/>Queen Elisabeth I, needing money to run the country, established a national lottery in 1567. The lottery worked by putting tickets with the participant&#8217;s names into a &#8218;lot pot&#8216;. An equal number of notes, some with the prizes written on them and some blank, went into another pot. Pairs of tickets were chosen (or &#8222;drawn&#8220; &#8211; &#8222;to draw&#8220; had a similar meaning to the word &#8222;to pull&#8220;) from the two pots, matching a person to a prize. If you drew a blank, you didn&#8217;t win a prize. So the idiom came to mean &#8222;not having enough luck&#8220;.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In modern usage,\u00a0<em>draw a blank<\/em> more commonly means to fail to remember something, though the older meaning is still in use.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had to give a presentation to the CEO about the new product we are developing. I was very nervous. He asked me simple questions which I could normally answer with no problems, but because of my nerves I drew a blank (sich nicht erinnern k\u00f6nnen). It really looked like I had no idea what [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"__cvm_playback_settings":[],"__cvm_video_id":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[10],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lingua-franca.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lingua-franca.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lingua-franca.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lingua-franca.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lingua-franca.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.lingua-franca.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":305,"href":"http:\/\/www.lingua-franca.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions\/305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lingua-franca.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lingua-franca.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lingua-franca.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}