YouTube / iTunes / Spotify / Radio Public / Pocket Casts / Google Podcasts / Breaker / Overcast
Listen to ArtisanEnglish.jp posts & lesson intros here.
Word of the Day: Inertia
I’d venture to guess that the majority of people in Japan right now are suffering from inertia.
If you’re right here, right now, you know it’s hot.
I don’t mean hot; I mean, H!-O!-T!
The dog days of summer have arrived early this year.
Every day, the temperature is over 35℃.
At night, it doesn’t go below 25℃. (If you want to know what that is in °F, multiply by two and add thirty.)
It’s tough to sleep without the AC on, and pretty much impossible to enjoy being outside.
It’s nuts!
The heat is driving people, or at least me, out of their gourds.
It’s so hot you don’t want to do anything, leading us to the Word of the Day.
Inertia is a lack of activity or a lack of interest in doing anything at all.
Anyone who has any association with Japan knows that Japanese summers are hot and humid.
Some people say that lazy people suffer from inertia.
They say they’re bored and nothing interests them, but they don’t want to move.
If lazy people just started moving, they would quickly lose the feeling of inertia and have fun.
Sometimes inertia feels good, like on a cold winter’s night when you sit under the kotatsu (a low Japanese table with a heating element underneath), watch an old movie and eat mandarines or tangerines.
In a summer heatwave that has lasted for about ten days and will continue for perhaps another ten, inertia does not come from laziness.
It comes from extreme heat and humidity.
In times like this, you almost wish you were in the depth of winter.
Hopefully, we’ll all get through this heatwave and be able to look back on it in the future as a dreadful summer.
I hope it’s a one-off and not a sign of climate change.
If this happens every summer – the inertia may get too much, and even blinking will be too much activity.
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 74.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.