The following day brought news from Richmond to throw every thing else into the background.

My comments:

If you draw a picture with a piece of chalk on a blackboard, the blackboard is the background. The background is there, without which anything drawn won’t be distinguishable, but it is often ignored.

Hence, something that is said to be in the background is behind the main thing that we’re looking at, and is considered relatively unimportant because they are not notable (due, often, to the very fact that they go unnoticed).

In the above example, the news brought from Richmond the following day immediately became the center of everyone’s attention, thus throwing everything else into the background – making them unimportant by contrast.

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Go to Zhang Xin's column

本文僅代表作者本人觀點，與本網立場無關。歡迎大家討論學術問題，尊重他人，禁止人身攻擊和發(fā)布一切違反國家現(xiàn)行法律法規(guī)的內容。

About the author:

Zhang Xin（張欣） has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.