[Sca-cooks] Word usage was Re: remove vs course
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius.magister at verizon.net
Tue Jun 6 19:49:57 PDT 2006
On Jun 6, 2006, at 9:24 PM, Terry Decker wrote:
> Rather than just "probably unverifiable," "probably apocryphal"
> denotes a
> likely but undetermined fraud or lack of authenticity. If not used
> correctly in context, it can be very misleading. Which is what I
> think
> bothers Adamantius, the improper usage.
>
> Bear
It may be the mysterious Catholic thing at work, but it should be
pretty easy to determine if something is, or is not, in the
Apocrypha. But yes, that's a bit silly. In the larger sense, if we
know of something that is or is not verified, we say it is
apocryphal, like, say, all those funny anecdotes that are all told of
Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, and George Bernard Shaw
interchangeably, and probably never actually occurred. We don't know
if this actually happened. ("Madame, you are very ugly!" "Sir, you
are very drunk!"...etc.)
When we say it's probably apocryphal, what most people seem to tend
to mean is that it is perhaps untrue, or is of dubious authenticity,
but from a diction point of view, what it actually does mean is more
like, there's some question about the question of whether it's true.
Generally speaking, it tends to be redundant in practical usage.
Adamantius
More information about the Sca-cooks
mailing list