YouTube / iTunes / Spotify / Radio Public / Pocket Casts / Google Podcasts / Breaker / Overcast
Listen to ArtisanEnglish.jp posts & lesson intros here.
English Phrase: Make your blood run cold
As the leaves fall and days grow shorter, we know Halloween is growing closer.
There’s something about Halloween that makes your blood run cold.
It could be that thoughts of witches and black cats come more quickly to our minds as we walk down lonely streets and dark alleyways.
There was a time when the sight of a Jack o’ lantern would send shivers down your spine, but you’re all grown up now and know that such things are all nonsense.
Or are they?
When you feel frightened or somehow unnerved by whatever it is you see, hear or perhaps sense, it makes your blood run cold.
During the Halloween season, people tend to like being scared.
For some reason, they are attracted to the macabre.
It could be a way of dealing with our fear.
If we can laugh at our fear or somehow make fun of it, it doesn’t seem real.
Either way, humans have always had a fear of the unknown.
We have always had a way to explain what we thought was out there in the dark, lurking and waiting for one of us to wander by.
Strange noises at night have always made our blood run cold.
These are the things that make our imagination run wild.
Whether it’s Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, Jack the Ripper or Stingy Jack doomed to wander the world, none of them genuinely exist (or at least not anymore).
Nowadays, they are all just stories which we unpack, dust off and tell each other during Halloween to make our blood run cold.
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 79.
The higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100, the easier the passage is to read.