Two minds?

Reader question:

Please explain “two minds” in this headline (Yahoo.com, June 6, 2016):

Premier League: Arsenal made to wait with Jamie Vardy in two minds over Leicester transfer.

My comments:

Jamie Vardy is a professional football player for Leicester City in the English Premier League. He helped Leicester, hitherto minnows, to the championship and was named Footballer of the Year in the just-concluded 2017-16 season.

Currently, Vardy is torn.

He is torn between continuing to play for Leicester, the new Premier League champion or Arsenal, a much bigger club of international renown.

He is torn because he is “in two minds.”

Well, to make it easier to understand, he is not of one mind, or single-minded. When we say someone is single-minded, we mean that they have one goal and one goal only.

Because they have one goal only, they don’t get distracted by other things and, therefore, are likely to succeed.

Or at least they’re more likely to appear decisive and resolute, unwavering.

Opposite that is the situation facing Vardy, who is, as it were, two-minded. To say he’s “in two minds” is literally to say that his mind is in two places at the same time.

Specifically, perhaps Vardy wants to play for both clubs. Since that cannot happen, he has to make a choice between the two and he cannot make a decision.

Anyways, in short, when someone is in or of two minds about or over something, they have two conflicting choices to make but cannot make a decision as to which course of action to take.

In that situation, they may appear hesitant, doubtful, wavering and indecisive because, let’s face it, they just don’t know what to do.

All right, to bring the point home, let’s read a few more examples of people who share the same problem facing Vardy, who, by the way is still unable to make a decision, as of now, at the time of writing.

1. On screen the Don may not look as if he is scared of anything, but in real life Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan admits that he was in two minds before performing a risky 300-foot-high jump for his upcoming film Don 2.

Sporting his Chak De! India look at a press conference here, the actor said that when director Farhan Akhtar told him to perform the stunt, he asked him why he won’t perform it himself. “He agreed and jumped. Now Farhan is an expert in sky-diving having jumped 99 times. But when you are in the film industry for two decades, the audience believes that I can fly. While looking down at the ground I felt it was better to do a romantic film. So I was in two minds!” said the actor, who performed the daring stunt in Berlin.

Answering questions in his characteristic way with humour and sarcasm, Shah Rukh was slightly taken aback when asked whether Don had a baneful influence on children. “When it comes to moral values, my character Kabir Khan (“Chak De! India”) as a hockey coach was a person of values. But did it make people become a hockey coach? Don is a mafia don, but I think this film would be watched by my children. Today’s children are an intelligent lot who work on the Internet.”

- “I was in two minds about the 300-foot-high jump in the film”, TheHindu.com, December 21, 2011.

2. This is not, at first glance, a very Trump-like place.

A tidy village in Germany’s wine country, Kallstadt is home to modest people, modest houses and an open, welcoming attitude toward outsiders — immigrants, tourists and oenophiles alike.

It is also home to people who claim an ancestral relationship to Donald Trump, who can trace his roots to a Kallstadt family once known as the Drumpfs. And that connection is making the people of Kallstadt a little uneasy.

“At first we used to just laugh about Trump running for president, but it’s not funny anymore,” said Bernd Weisenborn, a 54-year-old winegrower whose immaculately clean vineyard lies just across the street from the house where Trump’s grandfather Friedrich grew up. “It’s actually becoming embarrassing; the things that Trump has been saying are just out of line.”

Weisenborn, a friendly man with a hearty laugh, said he is a distant cousin of the Republican presidential front-runner — his great-grandfather was the brother of Trump’s grandmother. He described Kallstadt residents as generally open-minded, tolerant and welcoming, and said many find Trump’s policy statements and outbursts of vulgarity difficult to digest.

“We’re of two minds about Trump,” he said. “On the one hand, it’s great to see someone with Kallstadt roots become such a business tycoon in America. It’s the American dream. But on the other hand, it’s hard to be proud of anyone who makes such statements against Muslims, immigrants and women.”

- What do residents of Trump’s ancestral village in Germany think of him? Not so nice, LATimes.com, March 21, 2016.

3. The first scenes in Remembering the Man – a new documentary that explores the 16-year romance between writer and activist Timothy Conigrave and his lover John Caleo – feature Conigrave himself as the narrator.

Having died in October 1994, shortly after completing his memoir Holding the Man, Conigrave could never have known that what he wrote would go on to become one of Australia’s most beloved non-fiction books. Nor could he have known he would one day be posthumously narrating a moving account of their relationship and the forces he and Caleo battled against, including homophobia, bigotry and the virus that eventually struck them both down.

In 1993, when Aids was sweeping Australia and no effective treatment existed, an oral project was created by the National Library of Australia to preserve the stories of Aids victims. More than two decades later Conigrave’s decision to take part allows audiences to watch his story narrated in part by his own voice.

For film-makers Nickolas Bird and Eleanor Sharpe, the directors of Remembering the Man, the library initiative was a major discovery. Until that point Sharpe had been in two minds about making the film but, says Bird, “When we found that audio interview Eleanor said, ‘Ah, we have a film.’ That was the moment.

“We met with a couple of people and they said, ‘You just have to use his voice, this is remarkable.’ But it also created problems because we didn’t have visuals for it … it was like ugh, how are we going to do that?”

- 'I just sat there and cried': the making of Remembering the Man, TheGuardian.com, April 12, 2016.

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He 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.