YouTube / iTunes / Spotify / Radio Public / Pocket Casts / Google Podcasts / Breaker / Overcast
Listen to ArtisanEnglish.jp posts & lesson intros here.
WotD: Tight-lipped
Wow!
For the first time since the Second World War, a significant land war is occurring in Europe.
Before an attack, all countries are usually tight-lipped about what is happening.
In any conflict, information is as valuable as weapons.
Being tight-lipped means being very careful not to allow yourself to forget and discuss or mention anything that should be kept secret.
If you know what will happen and when you can prepare your defences or move out of the way.
In the days before the Russian invasion, the US chose not to remain tight-lipped.
They released information to the public to try to beat Putin at his own game.
President Biden said there was a very high likelihood of a full-scale invasion, but the Ukrainians and the world did not believe it to be true because they didn’t want to believe it to be true.
Perhaps it was a case of too much information to take in at a time.
Now that’s neither here nor there.
Russia has invaded, and the Ukrainians are killing them by the thousands.
Although the Russians remain tight-lipped about tactics and losses, it’s being published on reputable news websites from South Africa to Sapporo.
Information or intelligence, as it is often called, is of the utmost importance in a war.
Find out what your enemy’s plans are and outmaneuver him without revealing anything about yourself and your moves.
Putin himself is doing an excellent job of remaining tight-lipped.
Will he use nuclear weapons, or does he intend to use them? Nobody knows.
The one thing we can say for sure is you have to remain tight-lipped during wartime because loose lips sink ships.
But that’s an idiom for another day.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
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 68.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.