“Bad, bad, bad” .
Almost everywhere in the world, it means “bad”.
But here at the Dope, it means:
“start smiling!..she’s posting again!”
Another one today. Was watching a bit of a preseason football game, and one of the announcers mentioned running vertical (meaning lengthwise down the field) as opposed to lateral (side-to-side). That’s not the definition of ‘vertical’ that I remember.
Cf. Monty Python’s “Appeal for Sanity”:
You know, there are many people in the country today who, through no fault of their own, are sane. Some of them were born sane. Some of them became sane later in their lives. It is up to people like you and me who are out of our tiny little minds to try and help these people overcome their sanity. You can start in small ways with ping-pong ball eyes and a funny voice…
In Canada we have employment insurance.
“Lengthwise” would have been clearer, as well as being one syllable shorter than “vertical.” (Number-of-syllables being a frequent cause of meaning shifts, when humans choose a shorter word even if the meaning is ‘off.’)
The announcer was falling prey to that too-common propensity to choose the word that seems Cooler, in place of the word that conveys meaning without ambiguity.
McWhorter just loves being controversial. A defense of “I could care less” certainly provides him with plenty of angry responses…
I nominate “can” and “can’t.” Yes, they’re spelled differently but don’t linguists still focus on the spoken language? My ears (and brain) can’t distinguish the two words as spoken by many or most Americans.
For me, unless I’m stressing “can,” I use slightly different vowels, at least in casual speech. So, something closer to “I ken do it” or “I c’n do it” vs “I can’t do it” with an /ae/ sound. I would not say something like “I kent/k’nt” do it.
There is actually a whole class of words in German that can be misunderstood that way, because the prefix un- can be
- negatory, as in unvernünftig (unreasonable)
- augmentative, as in eine Unsumme Geld (a huge sum of money, not a non-sum of money)
Hence Untiefe with a negatory un- means non-deep, but with an augmentative un- means very-deep
Authentic ancient rusty sword or just a carbon kopis?