a secret worth keeping

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

information whose value — whether to protect someone's dignity, safety, or interests, to preserve trust, or to guard strategically important knowledge — is sufficient to justify the effort, loyalty, and sometimes personal cost of maintaining its confidentiality; the phrase implies a distinction between secrets that merit keeping because their disclosure would cause genuine harm and those kept merely out of habit, social convention, or self-interest; it also implies an evaluation of the keeper's trustworthiness — the person who can identify which secrets are worth keeping and honour that judgment consistently is a person of discretion and moral reliability; in organisations, identifying which information genuinely requires confidentiality versus which is merely inconvenient to disclose is a key test of ethical culture