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Idiom: South of / north of
Are you satisfied with your age?
If you’re 40, would you rather be south of 40 or north of 40?
South of and north of are both used to refer to being younger or older than a specific age.
40 is south of 50, and 65 is north of 60.
Don’t answer right away; think about it for a few seconds and then get back to me.
It seems to me that most of us either want to be either older or younger than we are.
When I was 15, I couldn’t wait to be 16 so I could get a driver’s license.
When I was 18, I couldn’t wait to be 19 so I could drink.
Now that I’m 44, I can’t wait to be 55 to retire.
Hey, I can dream, can’t I?
My point is that many people are like me; they also want to be another age.
All of my female students are 29.
It’s incredible, but somehow, it’s worked out that only 29-year-old women take my lessons.
Don’t get me wrong.
There’s nothing wrong with being 29.
I was 29 once, and I had a hell of a time.
I can’t remember much about it, so I must have enjoyed it.
Good times tend to fall by the wayside, and the bad times stay with you.
I have a sneaky suspicion that my female students are slightly older than 29.
For some reason, they want me to believe they are south of 30.
I was listening to a Lavar Burton Reads podcast the other day, in which he read a short story by Rachel Khong titled “My Dear You.”
It was a good story about a woman who died and went to heaven.
Heaven was very similar to life on Earth.
People went to the gym and cafes, and your laundry was done once a week on Tuesdays for free.
Oh yeah, and everyone was 33 years old.
When you died, if you were south of 33, you aged to 33, and if you were north of 33, you went back to being 33.
Thirty-three was somehow the perfect age.
What do you think?
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 89.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.