Acceptably Exceptional

On the ride home from work, the Conway Show was on the radio with Tim Conway Jr, and he threw out some fun wordplay. He said that for Father's Day, he received a message from a friend saying he was an "acceptable" dad. To which, he made a joke at the time, so the friend backtracked and claimed that he actually said, "exceptional," But someone wrote it down wrong.

So, here we have two words that sound very much the same, but they are at opposite ends of the scale of compliments. Conway said he actually liked "acceptable" as the better compliment, because it was more honest. "Exceptional" just sounded puffed up and fake. Or, as he put it, "I have met many exceptional dads over the years, and I'm not in that company."

That bit was exceptionally acceptable.

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RULY, RECK, and RobWords

There is a certain amount of linguistic Zen that comes from playing simple word unscrambler games, spinning around the question of why some words are accepted and others are not. A few nights back we played UNRULY, and for fun, I tried RULY on a whim, and the game accepted it, when I know other games have rejected it. I tried explaining it to Anne. It felt like a word to me, and it's in Merriam-Webster with the same example I thought of at the time: "I have seen some ruly crowds." It turns out that MW has a fascinating story about these two words, see here . "Ruly" did exist for centuries, got replaced by UNRULY, only to come back as a back-formation from UNRULY to fill the gap it once filled. It turns out that these cases are considered "Lost positives", words where the positive root word has faded from usage while the negation of the word is still going strong. Here is a video from RobWords that gives a good overview. I have been enjoy...

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