Is there a difference in meaning between these two sentences?
I also heard Joan Collins in an interview talking about her sister and she said: 'When I first heard about Jackie’s passing, I was devastated."
@Alan, @Anglophile, @Arinker, @NearlyNapping
Thank you.
Which two sentences do you mean? The ones on the title or the one under your question?
If it is the former, I don’t think there is any difference between the two.
Hi Anglophile,
The ones in the title and the one I’ve written in the message box.
She may have heard about Jackie’s passing more than once. And when she heard about it for the first time, she was devastated. (This means that her feeling or the news was not so devastating as when she heard about it again later)
Thank you, Anglophile.
The ones in the title mean the same thing. The first one might be slightly more formal, but it’s mostly just a choice of words.
“When I first heard about” probably means something like the initial impact.
Thanks NN, by the way I saw some sort of documentary about Joan Collins’s life on BBC TWO on New Year’s Day and she said, although she was British born and bred, that she wanted to become American.
I didn’t know she was British. But then I don’t know much more about her other than the name. I don’t even know why she’s famous - I assume she’s an actress or something. I don’t really keep up with celebrities (other than musicians).
Hi NN, she is best known as the evil Alexis Carrington in the American soap ‘Dynasty’. Her filmography is quantité négligeable, to be very honest. However, I like the lady because she’s always beautifully dressed, yet the television series in which she played a leading role was full of ridiculous plot lines, but it’s also true that when Aaron Spelling chose her to play that role, the series went up in the Nielsen ratings from the moment she appeared on screen and ‘Dallas’ got a competitor. She was also lucky, very lucky to get that part, because it had been offered to Sophia Loren, an Italian actress, but she turned it down.
May I ask which musicians you keep up with, because I play the saxophone, now it is soprano, but if can play one, you can play them all.
Thank you for your reply.
This would take years to answer. 
I grew up in the “classic rock” era of the 60s and 70s. So that’s the music I’m most familiar with. It’s a minority of the music I listen to today, but my memory of it is better since I’m half senile now and things don’t stick in my brain the way they used to.
So I grew up listening to the broad category of “rock”, which includes rock-n-roll and a lot more. I especially like blues oriented music - initially blues rock, then moving toward other styles of blues as I got older. We didn’t have anything like YouTube when I was young, that’s a recent thing. YouTube and Internet radio allow for a tremendous amount of exploration. I tend to explore backwards in time, before I was born, more so than newer music. You know how YouTube can be - semi-random clicks going into unexplored territory.
I was a huge party animal when I was young, commonly going to several parties a week, and sometimes several in one night. Rockin’ party music went well with that lifestyle. As I’ve gotten older my taste in music has chilled quite a bit. Although I still rock out at times. Mostly I prefer to kick back these days.
Most of my exploring these days is older blues music, and touching on older blues/jazz that was from my father’s era. My dad was into music and would have loved YouTube if he was still alive to witness it. The thing is that we was a techie who had a computer several years before anyone else I knew. He was a EE and a communications expert who did some work on the early techs used for the Internet. But he didn’t live long enough to see it come to full fruition.
As for sax, I don’t really know much about it.I know a few big names like Getz and Coltrane, but I’m not a big fan of that style of music. I don’t dislike it, but it’s not something I’ll listen to for hours. I typically get 5-10 music CDs from the library each month. I recently grabbed a Coltrane CD. It’s not really my style of music. I’m a big Van Morrison fan. He plays sax in a lot of his music. I like his style of sax better than Coltrane.
Have you heard Bill Clinton play sax? He used to play it at some of his campaign rallies.
Edit: That all sounds more narrow than what I listen to. It’s such a big subject. I should add that along with blues, I like a lot of American “black” music - blues, some jazz influenced, soul, Motown pop, funk, some R&B, etc. That is still the short list though. There are not many styles I don’t like.
Thanks NN for sharing this with us and no, I’ve never heard Bill Clinton play the sax.