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Idiom: Have a soft spot for (someone or something)
Snakes?
How could David have a soft spot for snakes?
You may be wondering.
Well, to be honest, I don’t.
I chose it to get your attention.
It worked, right?
So, mission accomplished.
Sometimes, to teach somebody something, you first need an attention grab.
Let me do some teaching, and you do some learning here.
When you have a soft spot for someone or something, you like them, but that fondness is not readily understandable by other people.
It’s also often difficult for you to explain why you like them.
If you have a weakness for puppies, it’s easy for others to understand why you like them.
I mean, they’re cute, cuddly and do funny things.
But snakes?
You need an outstanding imagination to say that snakes are cuddly or cute.
That’s what it means to have a soft spot for something.
You like something that is not likeable.
To give another example, I like cars. I know a cool car when I see one.
Something like the Chrysler PT Cruiser was just not a cool-looking car.
It was quite weird.
Fortunately for Chrysler, many (well, maybe not THAT many) people had a soft spot for that car.
I didn’t get it then, and I still don’t get it now, but to each their own.
Staying with cars, in my opinion, the Nissan Rasheen sold in Japan is, in the history of cars, one of the ugliest cars ever made.
It looks like a nasty SUV squished by a giant.
It’s not even an SUV!
But once again, some people have a soft spot for that car.
Some people enjoy watching bad movies.
I have no idea why, and perhaps they can’t put their finger on the reason either.
I guess there’s no accounting for taste.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 6th-grade education (age 11).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 84.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.