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WotD: Empty promise
Politicians are often accused of lying to the public, telling them what they want to hear and making empty promises.
In short, they are criticized for being dishonest.
I’m not saying that everyone who wins elected office is bad.
An empty promise is one that you do not intend to fulfill, a false assurance to do or fix something that’s never done or fixed.
Politicians have been known to tell the truth on occasion.
The problem is the microphones are never around when they do it.
So, for the most part, what the public sees is politicians who bend the truth or make empty promises to win an election.
I’ve covered bend the truth before, and you can click on the hyperlink to review that if you need.
Our word for today is empty promise.
An empty promise is one that you do not intend to fulfill.
Another way of defining it is to say that an empty promise is a false assurance to do or fix something that’s never done or fixed.
It’s not only politicians who make empty promises to win an election.
Husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, company managers, salespeople with their sweet talk and entrepreneurs make empty promises every day.
People have been using these tactics for a long time to get their way and attain what they want or need.
They may have been able to get away with it in the past because people would not know any better.
But today, with the advent of social media and the 24-hour news cycle, it is harder for everyone to get away with telling untruths or making empty promises.
In this day and age, where information is so easily accessible, it is much easier to catch people making empty promises and hold them to account.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 66.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.