Fly-by-night

A witch flying-by-night on a broom.

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WotD: Fly-by-night

Tis the season for online shopping, tra, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. OK, so I’m tone-deaf.

However, I can enjoy the Christmas season as well as you can.

Go easy on me, please. I’m an AI voice, not an AI singer.


A fly-by-night company is one that is unreliable and untrustworthy.

It is often a company with no or a bad reputation.


Especially in the era of the coronavirus pandemic, more and more people are spending copious amounts of money online.

One of the problems arising from this increase in online activity is how to know which businesses are reputable and which are fly-by-night.

A fly-by-night company is one that is in business for the money and will do whatever it can to get it.

They have no regard for their customers or employees and thus provide poor customer service.

This means they are unreliable and untrustworthy.

If something goes wrong, they will evade responsibility for it and instead try to blame somebody else, or they will ghost you.

This type of business is often hard to spot because they operate in a way that doesn’t leave a lot of telltale evidence of their wrongdoing.

People often complain that Amazon or other well-known online retailers are too big, but they are big because they have proven themselves to be trustworthy.

If you buy something from Amazon, you receive it – every time.

You may be wondering why an untrustworthy company with no or a bad reputation is described as fly-by-night.

Well, it comes from witches flying on broomsticks at night.

If a witch was caught doing something wrong, they could fly away into the night and not be caught.

A fly-by-night company can take your money and disappear.


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 65.

The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.


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