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WotD: Mesmerize
It must be tough to be a hypnotist these days.
Everyone is so busy multitasking while using their smartphones that you can’t get an opportunity to mesmerize them.
Perhaps that’s just what the problem is.
Everyone is so mesmerized by smartphones that they can’t direct their attention to anything else for any length of time.
When’s the last time you had someone’s complete attention for more than 60 seconds without them looking at their phone or even just holding it in their hand?
These short attention spans have affected me as an English teacher as well.
If you’ve made it this far in this post, you’ve read 123 words by the time you get to the end of this sentence.
That’s amazing!
These days, not many people want to spend time reading, even though it’s one of the best ways to improve their language skills.
Even native speakers of any language need to read long-form articles and novels to maintain their language skills.
People are too quickly mesmerized by YouTube cat videos or videos of female road rage in America.
As a result, they’ve lost the ability to concentrate for extended periods.
If you’ve made it this far, you are not one of those people.
So far, you’ve read 215 words!
So, mesmerize means to concentrate on something so much that you cannot think of anything else.
I love visiting aquariums and watching sea turtles or jellyfish.
Both of them can mesmerize and occupy me for hours.
Watching their rhythmic movements as they move around their tanks is extraordinarily soothing and relaxing for me.
I suppose I could say it’s therapeutic in a way.
They enable me to recharge, and then I’m more than able to give my undivided attention to whatever the task at hand is.
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 70.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.