3 ms·

How can "shades of" be inscrutable in any language? Genuinely curious. I think I picked it up immediately from context.

• smcl 7y ago
  The combination of the unusual game sharing the name with a tube stop and the unusual expression could leave anyone unfamiliar with either completely lost, as demonstrated by the OP. The way the expression is used it's often just in a sentence of its own, with the aforementioned ${thing} usually being some specific cultural reference. For example if a Czech person was watching English football and heard the phrase "Shades of 1966" I have no doubt they could parse and understand every word in the sentence ... but it's quite possible they'd have no idea what was meant because "1966" has special cultural significance for most English people, and the "shades of ..." doesn't really hint at anything on its own. My girlfriend speaks English as a second language, and speaks it beautifully, but can struggle if I use idioms or phrases which are far more commonplace than this, partly because of how many we have in English and partly because they can be unusual.