Phrase: Get under your skin
English is a beautiful and fantastic language which can get under your skin in both senses of the idiom.
Sorry to tell you, but yes, this idiom also has two different meanings depending on the context in which it is used.
The first meaning of this idiom is that something is an irritation.
I’ve been an English teacher for quite a while now, and let me tell you, I know that English can get under the skin of some students.
For some students, prepositions are like mosquitoes flying around their heads in the middle of a sweltering August night.
It’s just an irritation that they cannot get used to and will never be able to get rid of.
Well, you can always kill the mosquito the following day when you find it flying slowly because it’s full of your blood.
Prepositions, however, will never go away.
They’re a constant irritation that gets under your skin.
That brings us to the second meaning of today’s idiom: an obsession.
Remember when you first fell in love?
You couldn’t get the other person out of your mind.
If you know that feeling, you know what it means to have someone under your skin.
They are an obsession that you can’t get away from.
Honestly, the best way to get rid of that feeling of obsession is to marry them.
The obsession easily wears off after a few years of waking up and seeing their face first thing in the morning.
Morning breath, bed head, and unpleasant bathroom aromas will quickly wake you from your dreamy state. (I’m kidding!)
So there you have it.
When something is getting under your skin, it’s either irritating you, or you’re falling in love with it.
I’ll leave it up to you to put two and two together and determine which it is.
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 76.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.
