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Word of the Day: Snake oil
You can’t blame anyone new to Japan for thinking Japanese love to take pills.
It seems there’s an infomercial flogging a remedy for every ailment of the human body.
It’s all snake oil if you ask me.
Take a few turtles, kill’em, grind’em up, turn’em into powder and press’em into pill form, and you have a miracle pseudo-medicine that’ll replace all the collagen in your body.
No matter what age you are, take a few of these pills every day, and you’ll be able to do fifty sit-ups, run a marathon and take the stairs to the top of the Tokyo Sky Tree all before breakfast.
Yeah, right.
Snake oil, I tell you.
It’s all snake oil! Well, actually, those pills contain Japanese soft-shell turtles, but toMAYto-toMAHtoe, right?
Snake oil is a euphemism for fake health products or false advertising that tries to trick people out of their hard-earned money.
No, I’m not going to argue with you about whether soft-shell turtle pills work or not.
All I’ll say is that if they did work, they’d be famous around the world.
As another example of snake oil, do you remember the news story from a few years back about the group selling tap water in lovely glass bottles?
They marketed it as a cure for everything from baldness to colon cancer.
At somewhere around ¥10,000 a bottle, it was some costly snake oil.
At least it was only water and didn’t kill anyone; that’s all I can say.
Don’t let any snake oil salesmen fool you out of your money.
Take the slick marketing campaigns with a grain of salt, eat right and get plenty of exercise.
You’ll feel better, have more money in the bank and save a few turtles.
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 77.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.