Idiom: Hang out to dry
Yep, that’s right.
Your clothing is something that you should hang out to dry, but you should never do this to your friends.
In this case, hang out to dry means abandoning or deserting someone, especially when they need you the most.
When things are going well, everyone is your friend.
When things start to go poorly, you find out who your real friends are.
Those who are not your friends will hang you out to dry as soon as there is a sign of trouble.
Let’s imagine a workplace scenario.
Two workers are working on a tedious project.
Worker A comes up with the bright idea of writing a program to do the work for them.
The other worker, worker B, agrees, and they spend most of their time working on the program together.
If the program works, it can finish their assigned tasks quickly.
If the program doesn’t work, they will have wasted their and the company’s time. Plus, the job will still not be done.
In the end, the program is a good idea, but it fails.
The boss doesn’t see it that way, though.
She only sees the wasted time with nothing to show for it but a useless program.
She asks whose terrific idea (sarcasm) it was to write the program in the first place.
Worker A raises their hand.
Worker B says nothing.
Then the boss begins to berate and scold Worker A in front of the entire office.
Again Worker B says nothing.
Worker B has hung Worker A out to dry.
They do not support Worker A at all.
Worker A takes all the blame and is publically humiliated as well.
You see, that’s what happens when someone hangs you out to dry.
It’s not nice.
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 86.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.
