I was pleased to see in the news that Garuda Airlines will be allowed to fly to Europe again. Garuda is Indonesia’s national airline and I have flown with them quite a few times since I moved to Indonesia five years ago and found them to be quite reasonable.
The first piece of vocabulary from this article I would like to focus on is ‘blacklist’:
The European Commission has taken Garuda Airlines and three other Indonesian carriers off its aviation blacklist, citing safety improvements.
The Merriam Webster dictionary has a nice, clear definition of it:
a list of people or products viewed with suspicion or disapproval.
I think we could also add organisations and companies to the list of things that can be on a ‘blacklist’. The next interesting word is ‘citing’. In the example above, ‘citing safety improvements’ means that the European Commission has used the safety improvements to justify taking the three Indonesian airlines off the blacklist.
There’s one more world I would like to explain from this article and this time it’s not an English one. The ‘Garuda‘ is a mythical bird-like creature from Hindu and Buddhist mythology. It’s also the national symbol of Indonesia.
What’s the national symbol of your country?