Just as saying your bunny ears are puerile would make many folks think there is something sexually offensive about them, when all I said was they are childish.
Media types use this connotative kind of stuff all the time.
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frank theriault wrote:
On Tue, 07 Sep 2004 11:05:13 -0400, graywolf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Another one of those Latin words that get bad connotations just for being Latin. As Peter says, mediocre is actually synonymous with OK. Not great, not bad, just OK!
Well, Tom,
I agree with you and Peter, insofar as mediocre likely means "of medium or ordinary quality". Which really isn't a bad thing, is it?
Of course, in the way in which it's currently used, mediocre means "of barely acceptable quality", or worse.
My guess is that we (at least we in the West) live in a world of superlatives. So, if it's not "the best", it must be bad. Middling is not good enough. In fact, Good Enough is not good enough, if you catch my drift.
It used to be that to put forth a supreme effort was to "give 100%". But since that phrase is so overused, it's now no longer meaningful to
us. Now, we must give "110%", "200%", or as I heard from a sports
commentator during the Olympics, "1000%!" <vbg>
I won't go into the reasons for all of the above (OT, plus not nearly enough room here for that sort of discussion), but suffice to say that since everything new is touted as "the best", then in order to distiguish between all these things that are "the best", we have to come up with new "super-superlatives". In the meanwhile, "ordinary" words, like mediocre and "nice", end up being insults, when they are in reality anything but that.
cheers, frank the ordinary
-- graywolf http://graywolfphoto.com/graywolf.html
