I love words, especially dangerous, tricksy words that squiggle and squirm, always struggling to impart unintended meanings. I found such a word today.
The witness is incredible!
It was a sentence similar to the one above that made me realize just how incredibly dangerous “incredible” can be. My first instinct was to interpret it as a compliment, because it is often used to mean “unexpectedly good,” but that didn’t jibe with the rest of the paragraph. I took the word apart and discovered another meaning hidden in its pieces: the prefix “in-” and the main part “credible” which together mean “not believable.” In this case, the word “incredible” was intended as a criticism, a polite way of saying “Liar!”
Incredible: Sometimes positive, sometimes negative, never to be taken for granted. A delightfully duplicitous word!
Where is the list of neologisms? I frequently confuse fizzy bev and fuzzy boo.
There’s now a Glossary page!