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Idiom: Get the ball rolling
Hey there, everyone. Happy New Year!
I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season.
Here in Japan, it’s common to say you had a ‘sleeping New Year.’
It means all you did during the New Year’s holidays was eat, sleep and drink.
That’s what I did, and I loved it!
Now, we are already one full week into 2021, so it’s time to get the ball rolling.
There have been no new posts on ArtisanEnglish.jp since December 21st.
You and I both have had it easy for too long.
I’m back in harness and ready to go.
Let’s put our noses to the grindstone and make 2021 a successful year, shall we?
We’ll start the year with an idiom that originated in the 1840 American presidential election.
Yes, it was a long time ago.
These days the phrase means to begin doing something to encourage others to do it too.
For example, if you want your husband to exercise, but he is putting up a lot of resistance to it, you could get the ball rolling by taking a weekly yoga class.
Once he sees your bikini body coming back, he’ll be inspired to work on his.
In 1840, General William Harrison’s political supporters created a colossal ball covered in campaign slogans out of leather and tin to get back to the phrase’s origin.
This ball was then rolled around the country to ramp up publicity for him.
People were encouraged to help push it and, therefore, ‘keep the ball rolling.’
Through the natural course of history, the meaning of the phrase morphed, and now, when we do some activity as an example for someone to follow, we say we are trying to get the ball rolling.
These days it has nothing to do with politics, but politics is where it originates.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 73.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.
