People celebrate the coming of the New Year in different ways all over the world. I was surprised to see on the Reuters website that many Russians choose to celebrate in a sauna.
Whilst a sauna is a very hot place, almost hot enough to toast bread, that’s not the kind of toast the title of this article refers to. The kind of toast in this article is when people raise a glass of some kind of alcoholic drink and say a few words to celebrate a special event.
The next interesting word in this article was ‘revellers‘. To ‘revel‘ means to really enjoy something so ‘revellers‘ are people who are really enjoying a particular activity. In this case, celebrating New Year in a sauna!
There was another interesting word later on in the article where Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu is quoted saying that it might seem ‘funny‘ that so many people die in saunas. Obviously, he doesn’t mean funny (humorous), he means funny (peculiar/strange).
The last word I would like to look at here is ‘alcohol-fuelled‘. When we talked about an ‘alcohol-fuelled‘ celebration, we mean one at which the guests rely on drinking alcohol to have a good time.
Today’s image is by Marta Rostek.