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Idiom: Make your skin crawl
We are still about five weeks out from Halloween, but the phrase make your skin crawl has come up on my list of ‘possible posts,’ so I’m going to write about it now.
It may be a giant spider slowly creeping up your naked back as you sleep, a snake slithering out from behind the toilet as you do your business or a weird guy trying to touch your leg in a park; whatever it is, it will make your skin crawl.
Do you understand the meaning?
Weird and strange things will make you feel fear and disgust or may even make you shiver.
This is what it means to make your skin crawl.
You get this feeling of fear and disgust and may even feel as if something is crawling on your skin.
Sometimes even thinking about it will make you shiver.
All three of these examples I have witnessed.
One morning when my wife and I were living in New Zealand, she woke up screaming.
It had been a hot night, and she had kicked off the sheets.
Later, a tunnelweb spider crawled up her naked back.
Like the dutiful husband I am, I killed the spider for her, then promptly went back to sleep.
In Japan, just after we moved into our new home, she found a baby snake in the bathroom.
Once again, you know who eliminated the threat.
It’s easy to see how those incidents may make your skin crawl.
The third situation, however, happened to me.
I was passing through Vancouver and had gone to the park on a sweltering summer day.
As I sat on a bench near Kitsilano Beach, I took off my shirt.
Not too long after, a guy sat next to me and put his hand on my leg.
I have nothing against gay people.
But I’m not gay, and I didn’t appreciate the advance.
Those were a few pre-Halloween anecdotes that may serve to make your skin crawl.
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 81.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.