I think the key words there are ‘his creation’. Victor created the creature, so Victor should have either taken responsibility for the care and education of it, as well as the protection of society from it if necessary. or he should have immediately disposed of it once he realized what a crime against nature he had unleashed upon the world.
OK, maybe he isn’t quite as morally wrong as the creature who committed child murder. But if I decide to just randomly hand a gun to a stranger, not knowing anything about their moral character, and the stranger turns around and shoots somebody to death with it, I think I’d bear some moral responsibility for the crime.
Despite my inclination to pedantry, I don’t really have huge problem with this, probably because “unique” is commonly used as a synonym for “rare”; in fact Merriam-Webster lists one definition for “unique” as equivalent to “unusual”, being out of the ordinary, and gives similar words as “rare, unusual, extraordinary, outstanding, exceptional, or uncommon”, and the Cambridge dictionary agrees. It doesn’t necessarily mean “the only one of its kind” unless one is so pedantic as to only accept that one meaning.
That only works if the reason you assume the person is asking is indeed the reason that they’re asking. For a contrived example, if someone asks “have you eaten yet?” and you respond with “I hear that they’ve opened up a new Asian place down the road,” then that doesn’t answer the question if the real reason they answered was not that they were hinting at a restaurant, but that you’re trying out a new special diet in which you should eat every 3 hours. You may have just eaten but were thinking about the restaurant anyway, or you may have skipped your micro-meal entirely and were also thinking about the restaurant.
Of course, the majority of the time, assumptions of context are correct.
A few years ago there was a guy on some sort of social media who took offense (apparently sincerely) because people responded to his purely hypothetical questions like “What would you do if I punched you in the face?” as if they were not questions at all - and he was most upset to learn that so many people in the world just didn’t understand questions.
I meant no offense to Wodehouse whose work I enjoy. I was just going to use the change in the meaning of bimbo as yet another recent example of that common phenomenon in which a word changed from its original (and as @Johanna points out, its etymological) meaning. But people don’t complain about bimbo now meaning a woman instead of man, or about “head over heels” not making sense, when neither of those changes is any more logical than the current use of “could care less.” (amusingly, since "bimbo now means a woman, to talk about an empty-headed man, we had to invent “himbo”)
I find certain changes ugly (“asplode” does not appeal to me) but for all I know, 50 years hence it may see to be a perfectly reasonable word that people will define as traditional English (see how British folks defend “burgle” - which was a bit of silly word-play in much the same way of “asplode” is when it was invented).
In the 1780s, a British writer wrote this in a review of a work by an American:
“It may be an elegant [word] in Virginia, and even perfectly intelligible; but for our part, all we can do is to guess at its meaning.
which sounds very much like today’s complaints about words and phrases the young folks use that are impossible to understand logically. The word that the poor British fellow could not fathom was “belittle.”.
I figured it meant something like “don’t get too carried away” or “don’t go overboad” which seems pretty close.
Regarding Frankenstein - it’s a perfectly normal linguistic process to go from calling something cobbled together from pieces “A Frankenstein monster” to calling it “A Frankenstein” - the same way you might say that you “own a Ford” - meaning that you own a Ford car, and it would be ridiculously pedantic to suggest that you were being ambigious since that phrase suggests that you own a person named Ford.
This guy I’m thinking of doesn’t understand that when a stranger comes up to you talking about punching you in the face, it’s normal to understand that as a threat.
I would argue that “could care less” is a special kind of linguistic abomination because it co-exists with “couldn’t care less” (which is older, makes logical sense, and according to Google Ngram occurs about three times more often). I find it jarring that a phrase which expresses an affirmation should be taken to have exactly the same meaning as one that expresses a negation, and that the former likely came into being due to the unthinking repetition of a mishearing. Steven Pinker claims it’s actually witty sarcasm, but I don’t buy that for one minute.
I have a similar problem with the inappropriate use of “literally”. To be clear, I don’t demand that “literally” must always denote word-for-word precision of some sentence or expression. I just feel that we have to be careful when using it metaphorically to ensure that it conveys a meaningful metaphor. Using it as just a random intensifier is just annoying and ugly because it’s just noise, and, worse, requires the word to take on the exact opposite of its normal established meaning.
Thus, “she literally glowed with happiness” is a constructive metaphor because we tend to associate a kind of metaphorical radiance with happiness, even though I tend not to use the word that way very much. But “I was so surprised that my head literally asploded” is just ugly noise and seems to reflect a misunderstanding of both the literal and metaphorical uses of the word.
I feel like the Merriam-Webster entry was written specifically for you:
Correct Usage: Either
…if you are the kind of person who cries out against this abomination we must warn you that people who go through life expecting informal variant idioms in English to behave logically are setting themselves up for a lifetime of hurt.
Yep. I mean- is it understandable? Sure. Do we like it? No, but our opinions dont matter that much. Common usage sometimes does things that dont really make sense. I dont use “could” but when people do- I do not correct them or even roll my eyes. There might be a small internal sigh… …
And the battle over “literally” is lost and part of history.
The prefix “in-” can have multiple meanings., and negation is just one of them. It can literally mean “in”, as in “inside”, “infusion”, or “influx” It can mean “on”, as in “inscribe”. It can be a negation, as in “incomplete”, “incoherent”, or “insane”. “Invaluable” is an interesting one that isn’t as weird as it seems. Historically it was a legitimate negation that meant “not capable of being valued” but over time paradoxically simply came to mean “extremely valuable”.
As for inflammable/flammable, “inflammable” has the same Latin root as “inflame” and is not a negation. “Flammable” is a more recent invention and was presumably created to avoid the risk that the “inflammable” label might be dangerously interpreted as “not flammable”. As it turns out, I’m comfortable with both words because, happily, “inflammable” is the French form of both words so I’ve been used to seeing them both together on containers and vehicles.
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Meh, I’m not trying to be prescriptivist about this stuff, I’m just expressing a few usages I happen to personally dislike. IRL I wouldn’t even think to comment on them in ordinary conversation
You may have missed the nuance I was trying to describe. The use of “literally” to introduce a metaphor is old and well established. The “battle” – if there ever was one – to avoid metaphorical usage is certainly futile. What I object to is its random insertion as a meaningless filler or arbitrary intensifier. Some people pepper almost everything they say with “literally” because it sounds more emphatic. It’s become a filler just like the word “like”, the bane of teen-speak that some people carry through into adulthood and use so often that it’s, like, downright comical!
The alternate form of that, and probably more common, is “I don’t give a rat’s ass about [whatever]”. The negation there suggests that your example may be the same solecism that gave rise to “could care less” where for whatever reason the negation gets dropped.
There was no battle. Usage simply is. There is whining. There is complaining. There is bemoaning. There is simply not liking it. But any battle is in the mind of the prescriptivist alone. Usage doesn’t care.
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