YouTube / iTunes / Spotify / Radio Public / Pocket Casts / Google Podcasts / Breaker / Overcast
Listen to ArtisanEnglish.jp posts & lesson intros here.
Phrase: Put the cart before the horse
There is a natural order to most things.
If you upset that order to put the cart before the horse, so to speak, bad things can happen, or in a best-case scenario, things will not work correctly.
As a basic example, if you quit your old job before finding a new one, you may put the cart before the horse.
To put the cart before the horse means to do something in reverse order.
So, it’s better to find a new job and then quit your old one.
That way, you don’t have to worry about not having an income for an extended period.
Many monkeys swing from branch to branch.
They only take a chance and jump in extreme cases.
Okay, I will only confuse you if I have horses and monkeys in the same post.
Let’s get back to horses, then.
Traditionally, horses pull carts and carriages.
I have not seen many carts or carriages in my day, but a horse pushed none of the ones I’ve seen.
If you put the cart before the horse, the horse has to push it.
Horses are not good pushers.
In my childhood, my father used a horse to pull a sleigh loaded with firewood across a frozen pond to our truck.
Horses pull carts, carriages or sleighs.
That’s the natural order of things.
You never put the sleigh before the horse.
The horse pulls it, and the sleigh comes after.
In life, putting the cart before the horse often causes many unnecessary problems.
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 83.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.