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Idiom: Throw you a curveball
The explanation of this one is going to involve another baseball analogy.
To all of you non-baseball lovers out there, sorry about that.
I don’t create the language; I just work with it. Don’t shoot the messenger.
When you throw someone a curveball, you do or say something that presents them with an unexpected challenge or disruption to the way things typically work.
Mother Nature threw the entire world a curveball with the coronavirus pandemic.
Nobody expected a pandemic this year, and we’ve all had our lives disrupted by it.
Now, we have to figure out the best way to stay alive while dealing with it.
In the recent debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence, the fly threw us all a curveball when it landed on Mike’s snow-white hair.
Everyone feels they have to comment on it, but no one knows what to say.
Was it a sign? If it is, what does it mean? Has he been chosen or marked in some way?
It’s all too much to comprehend.
In baseball, a curveball is a pitch thrown so that its trajectory curves as it gets closer to the batter.
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It’s challenging for the batter to know where and at what point to swing within a split second.
The location where the ball will cross the plate is unpredictable.
As I mentioned on Saturday, humans love predictability.
Without predictability, all bets are off.
The curveball decreases the batter’s chances to have success and increases the opportunity for the pitcher to have success.
When life throws you a curveball, it’s probably too late to panic.
Sometimes all you can do is close your eyes, swing and hope for the best.
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 71.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.