Yup. “Less unique.” I’m only a bit of a dunderhead.
This would have been a funnier story if it were someone else at the meeting coming in to make fun of his coworker who thought he knew what a big word meant, but didn’t, and what a fool he looked like trying to explain his way out of it.
He was explaining what he meant by it and it was a metaphorical use. Not a perfect analogy to the literal definition, but a perfectly understandable one. Your position in this thread is a very strange one.
It’s obviously a metaphorical use, but it’s a bad metaphor/analogy, in my opinion. While it is understood what the OP meant by that word, his usage did make me stop in my tracks and wonder what the hell he was talking about. I almost always take the more descriptivist/liberal side on language debates, but the usage of “gerrymander” in the OP is artless.
That may be, but it’s also not entirely mystifying. And Contra’s continual insistence that “gerrymander” means nothing outside the context of political boundaries is mystifying. In English, we use words outside their literal context all the freaking time.
No arguments from me there.