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English Expression: Leave someone in your wake
There are two ways to look at this expression.
First, leaving someone in your wake can mean passing them in a race or competition.
Of course, it’s never nice to experience someone passing you in a race, but the expression is neither negative nor positive.
As I explained in an earlier post, wake refers to the waves left behind by a boat moving through the water.
If one boat passes another, the slower boat will be left in the wake of the faster boat.
So far so good, right?
OK, next, let me explain the second way to look at this expression. This meaning is negative.
If you leave something in your wake, you create some disturbance, destruction, confusion or other problems behind you.
Most recently, we could use the unfortunate city of Mosul in Iraq as an example.
The battle between ISIS and the Iraqi army is over, and Mosul is now free.
However, the fighting has left a destroyed Mosul in its wake.
Everything is up in the air at the moment, and it will take many years for the city to recover.
As a less strong example, we could think about children.
Yes, children and what they do are excellent examples.
Children may enter a tidy room, but when they leave, they leave a lot of mess and minor destruction in their wake.
Mothers worldwide know it’s a full-time job to follow children around and clean up after them.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a Xth-grade education (age X – X).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores X.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.
