4 ms·
Was the word “inflammable”?
by b0b0b0b 5y ago
Was the word “inflammable”?
- sime2009 5y agoI'm guessing "infamous". You know, when someone becomes more than just famous, then become "infamous".
- tomcooks 5y agoHow would that lead to the industry the company works in?
- sime2009 5y agoDon't take my comment too seriously. It's a scene from a movie actually.
- hnjst 5y agoI shouldn't start on these but I fail to resist, since you bring one of them on the discussion. This is one of numerous "faux-amis" that are so tricky for native French speakers. While "fameux" has the meaning an English speaker would expect, "Infâme" means odious. Other examples include "éventuellement" that means possibly (and not surely in the future), "actuellement" which translates as "nowadays" (and not really) etc. It may be chauvinism, but etymological and geographical clues let be believe that most of these are french words that have been imported into English and whose meanings changed radically. Admittedly, some probably share a common latin origin and were declined into similar words but retaining a different subset of their original meanings. It is often a source of weird misunderstandings between native French and English speakers, neither of which are famous for their mastery at learning foreign languages...
- jessaustin 5y agoI'm guessing "penultimate". Non-native speakers look up the dictionary definition, while the average American knows it means "really awesome".
- jogjayr 5y ago"Penultimate" is American slang for "really awesome"?
- antonvs 5y agoNope. Parent was attempting a weird joke, which failed badly.
- astrange 5y agoI think it's used in marketing sometimes because it sounds cool, so you'll assume it means something good if you don't understand it. Doesn't come up a lot though.
- jogjayr 5y agoI don't get the joke. It seemed somewhat plausible or serious to me because "ultimate" is slang for "really cool" in India. (At least it was when I was growing up; who knows what the cool kids there say these days.) But I was puzzled because I've spent the majority of my adult life in North America, and never heard "penultimate" used that way.
- antonvs 5y agoI was wrong. Apparently it is slang, in some places at least: > The word penultimate as a slang word seems to have worked its way into common parlance thanks to the slang use of the word ultimate. As a slang term, ultimate means cool rather than last. So the hipster logic may have concluded that if ultimate means cool, then penultimate must mean super cool. https://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/podcasts/grammar_grater/archive/2007/10/18/ https://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/podcasts/grammar_gra... I assumed the parent was making a joke that something like this would be the case. Turns out it really is. "Never underestimate the stupidity of..."
- hnjst 5y agoWhile the french equivalent "pénultième" is rarely heard and considered as pedantic, "antépénultième" is actually much more frequently used to avoid the ugly "avant-avant-dernier" (very really awesome).