I learned recently that I had the definition of epicene all wrong. I thought it meant roughly, “ephemerally tranquil and beautiful”. If you drink alcohol, imagine sitting at a quiet beach cafe on your second cocktail, as the sun goes down and the lights come on, before the crowd has really come in…that’s what I thought “epicene” was like. But instead, it means “ambiguous as to gender”, or effeminate or mannish, but without the negative spin of those terms. Rather like Martin Short’s character in the Father Of The Bride movies.
So I’m wondering if this sort of thing has happened to anyone else.
Nemesis is my latest discovery. I used to think it meant something like “arch-enemy”, and of course, there was the running joke on BtVS, Season 6, where the Evil Three referred to themselves as Buffy’s Arch-Nemesis…es, Nemeses…you know.
No, turns out that a nemesis is an agent of divine justice. So, depending on what kind of justice you deserve, your nemesis could offer you a nice hot cup of tea with some lemon. And, as an agent of divine justice, there really is only the singular. There is no plural form of nemesis.
To be fair, I went to that site expecting that it would offer the “archenemy” definition, because that’s what I like to define the word as meaning, but it didn’t.
I didn’t know that “spic” was a racial epithet until about a year ago. I always thought it was a snide way of referring to someone who was super-compulsive about being clean, as in “Spic and Span.” (Thank God I never used it!)
Actually nemesis does mean something close to ‘arch-enemy’. The definition mentions ‘retribution’ and ‘vengeance.’ ‘Nemesis’ is the proper name of the individual who is the divine agent.
Similarly, quintessential does mean something close to ‘very essential’. reference
Up until last year or so I thought shallots were a type of fish, that actual shallots were called scallions, and that actual scallions were just called green onions. It’s a good thing I never do recipies.
I also thought penultimate and ultimate meant the exact same thing until I was about 30.
My mother, who is one of those people who NEVER says bad words, described someone to me one day as a “C***.” I hit the roof, telling her that that is a foul, vulgar, disgusting thing to say about any woman, and that she was never to use the word to me again. She looked rather sheepish and said, “Doesn’t that just mean ‘prostitute?’”
For years, I thought attrition meant the opposite of what it means. This seems worse when you realize that in my workplace, the issue of attrition comes up every day. For example, if 90 out of a 100 students in a program complete their required credits, someone might say “huh, the attrition is okay, could be better” and I always thought they were talking about the 90 people, not the 10 people. When someone says “Here are our plans to improve attrition,” it kind of works either way so I was able to keep using my own personal definition for quite some time. If my boss would ask for info on attrition for some particular thing, I usually gave the whole package – 100/90/10 – so I guess I seemed thorough, as opposed to seeming like an idiot.
The other alarming thing is that at work, we almost always look at “retention and attrition” instead of just “attrition” by itself. As I thought attrition meant retention, one might think that eventually I would wonder why we had reports that essentially talked about “retention and retention” … but no, somehow that didn’t occur to me. I did have a vague sense that attrition was a more detailed analysis of retention.
I only recently learned that nonplussed meant confused. I always thought that it meant relaxed, as though to be plussed was to be in a state of agitation. So being nonplussed by a situation meant it didn’t phase you.
If she’s the sort of woman who never uses bad words, it seems like you reacted pretty harshly, there. Wouldn’t it have been simpler to ask “are you sure you know what that word means, Mom?” Clearly, she deserved the benefit of the doubt.
As to my own misunderstandings, I didn’t make the “ravish”-“rape” connection until fairly recently. At worst, I thought it meant something like “to injure minorly, to terrify.”
This one was mine as well. I equated “plussed” with “impressed” (as in a plus/positive effect) and therefore nonplussed meant someone or something was unimpressive or having no effect.
Disingenuous is another. I figured if “genuous” was like genuine then ingenuous is not genuine; therefore disingenuious would be sincere, real, honest.
It’s not exactly recent, but with the death last week of John Profumo (if you don’t immediately know who he was, the film “Scandal” was based on the incident for which he was most famous) I was reminded of my childhood misunderstanding of the word “osteopath”.
Profumo was the Minister for War but was involved with prostitutes, one of whom, Christine Keeler, was also seeing a Russian military attache. It wasn’t the risk of “pillow-talk” being passed to the Russkis that did for him, it was the fact that he lied about his liaison with Ms Keeler to Parliament.
Anyway, I recall as a kid of 4 or 5 seeing the scandal unfold on the TV news. One prominent figure was a bloke called Stephen Ward, who was always referred to as a “society osteopath”. I must have known the word “psychopath” and therefore imagined that “osteopath” was something bad - in my mind, it meant a procurer of prostitutes. I must have been about 12 before I found out what it actually meant.
That’s priceless.