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Phrase: Take the words out of your mouth
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
They say great minds think alike.
I say that’s why sometimes another person can take the words out of your mouth.
Yes, I know I shouldn’t mix my metaphors, but this is my post, so I’m going to do it anyway.
The singer Meatloaf might have said it best when he sang:
And then you took the words right out of my mouth
Oh, it must have been while you were kissing me
Meatloaf
So, what the heck does it mean to take the words out of someone’s mouth?
Well, for starters, you don’t have to kiss them.
What two people do in their own time is their business.
If you want to take Meatloaf’s words to heart, go right ahead.
For this post today, if someone takes the words out of your mouth, they say precisely what you are thinking.
It’s like thinking in stereo.
It may seem uncanny, but it happens more often than you may believe in my classes.
When you are deep in conversation with someone and agree on something, you may say what the other person is thinking.
At that moment, just after you speak, your conversation partner will smile and say, “You took the words out of my mouth.”
It also happens when two people click or have been in a relationship for a long time.
One partner tends to know what the other is thinking.
Unfortunately, in a heterosexual relationship, the woman can often take the words out of the man’s mouth.
Even after 20 years of marriage, the man still has no idea what the woman is thinking.
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 81.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.