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WotD: Put off
You may not have been left standing at the altar on your wedding day, but chances are you have been put off a few times.
Things don’t always go according to plan, and events or meetings have to be postponed or even cancelled, which is one of the meanings of the phrasal verb put off.
Due to the times in which we live, we have all put something off to protect ourselves and others from contracting coronavirus.
This leads me to the second meaning of put off: to lose enthusiasm for or interest in something or someone.
Meeting a very attractive person can be extremely exciting for the first time, but stinky breath or strong body odour (BO) can put you off extremely quickly.
One minute, you think they are hot, and the next minute, they are not.
Put (someone/something) off has two meanings:
1) to cancel or postpone an event or meeting
2) to lose enthusiasm for something.
It can happen that fast.
Speaking of something that can put you off, sometimes I like to read the dictionary.
It’s not the most exciting reading material I can find, but it beats reading ingredient labels on canned food.
The one thing fascinating about the dictionary is you quickly realize the plethora of words with heaps of nuances and meanings.
Very few words in the English dictionary have just one definition that works all the time.
As we saw today, put off means to delay or canceling an event or meeting, while it can also mean no longer being interested in or enthusiastic about something or someone.
That’s the beauty of language; it’s more like an art than a science.
The meaning of a word is all about the context in which it is used.
I hope that doesn’t put you off learning.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13-14).
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.