Tarnish

A tarnished silver chalice.
(Photo: Stephanie Harvey/Unsplash | Text: David/ArtisanEnglish.jp)

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Word of the Day: Tarnish

Social media is a tricky beast.

It’s one of the best ways to communicate with friends and potential customers, but if you put one foot wrong, you can quickly tarnish your reputation and never get over it.


What I mean is that when you tarnish your reputation, you do, say, or write something that causes people to suddenly think you are not as good as you thought you were.


One very recent example of a famous person tarnishing their image is Bryan Adams’ Twitter rant:

Tonight was supposed to be the beginning of a tenancy of gigs at the @royalalberthall, but thanks to some f***ing bat eating, wet market animal selling, virus making greedy bast****, the whole world is now on hold, not to mention the thousands that have suffered or died from this virus. My message to them other than ‘thanks a f***ing lot’ is go vegan.

Bryan Adams – Twitter

Bryan Adams is Canadian, and Canadians like to be known as ‘not being Americans.’

That means we try very hard not to be outspoken and offend anyone.

We apologize for asking for directions from a stranger, and then we apologize again for bothering them.

We have also been known to apologize for apologizing too much.

See what I mean?

So, when Bryan Adams swore THREE times on social media, and that wasn’t the worst thing he said, many Canadians were shocked and now have a severely tarnished image of him.

To add insult to injury, he repeated the fake news that, one, the virus came from eating bats and two, it came from laboratories in Wuhan making biological weapons.

Everyone is becoming a little stressed due to the coronavirus, but Bryan had to tarnish his image with four-letter words and fake news.

Oh, Bryan, what you have done defies belief.


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 62.

The easier the passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.



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