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Word of the Day: Off-kilter
The English language is full of funny little words, and off-kilter is one.
Something can be off-kilter or out of kilter, but it can’t be on-kilter or just plain kilter.
You’ll only see it used negatively.
Language is strange that way.
When something is off-kilter, it is not working as usual or expected.
For example, if a bicycle wheel is not installed perfectly straight, it will wobble when you ride it.
That’s because the wheel will be off-kilter or off-balance.
Monday mornings tend to throw some people off-kilter.
They wake up early after two days of sleeping in, lost in a sort of brain fog, and can’t seem to do anything correctly.
Monday has thrown them off-kilter, and it’ll take them a full twenty-four hours to cure themselves of Mondayitis.
The pandemic has thrown most of us off to some degree off-kilter.
Life tends to have an inevitable ebb and flow or pattern, and the restrictions we had to place on ourselves to survive the damn thing have thrown us off-kilter.
We all feel off-balance somehow.
This is why so many want to get back to normal, whatever the heck that is.
Life has been off-kilter for such a long time now that most of us can’t remember what normal was.
To be honest about it, being off-kilter has become routine.
This week I got thrown off-kilter by some unexpected events, and as a result, I missed my posting deadline for three days in a row.
Yep, a relatively minor computer problem on a Wednesday threw my posting schedule out of wack by three days.
Oh well, c’est la vie mon ami.
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 71.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.