Tuesday, 30 December 2025

Inappropriate and in...

On the sixth day of Antonym Christmas, the Internet gave to me:

Morphological negative concord

 

Mark Liberman at Language Log noticed that an awful lot of people type "inappropriate and inoffensive" when they clearly mean inappropriate and offensive"?  Why is it because we want a negative prefix on what is clearly a negative-feeling word?  (Click on the link for his examples.)

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