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Word of the Day: Niggle
Sometimes a thing will niggle you for a long time.
Have you ever left your house and then started to worry that you had left the kotatsu on?
You’re sure you turned it off but can’t clearly remember doing it.
That thought continues to niggle you all day long.
Niggle means something worries you just a little bit for a long time, and you can’t stop thinking about it.
Then there are times when you want to tell someone something, but you can’t remember what it was.
It’s on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t remember what it was.
That then begins to bother you. You keep trying to remember what you wanted to say.
The fact that you can’t recall it niggles you and continues to run through your mind until three or four days later, you finally remember.
That feeling is what niggle means – when something worries you just a little bit for a long time, and you can’t stop thinking about it, it niggles you.
For some people, names niggle them. I’ve had hundreds, if not thousands, of students over the years.
Some students are pretty memorable.
Then there are other students whose names I should remember but can’t.
I live in a rural prefecture where it’s common to bump into people you know.
I often meet someone, have a conversation with them and then walk away without remembering their name.
It niggles me to no end.
For example, last fall, I bumped into a teacher I had worked with for six years.
Of course, they knew my name, I’m the only white guy who lives here permanently, and even my wife’s name, but I had absolutely no idea who they were.
About three days later, I still couldn’t recall their name, so I got out a school yearbook and looked them up.
They were the vice-principal of the school.
That’s one name I definitely should have remembered.
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 easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.