While not the most intelligent primate on the face of the planet, I do not consider myself an idiot. Yet… I also immediately saw “venereal”. Jovian also makes me think of jovial, but it doesn’t “befuddle” me. Brains are designed to make connections to familiar things. There is that subliminal expectation for me, however, that if you’re calling something “Jovian”, my brain links it to “jovial” and I expect it to be so. I do not speak for the majority, just weighing in.
I think there is some merit to avoiding terms that link to negative connotation in your audience. If I created a creature called a Sock Tucker, who does nothing more criminal than stealing your socks from the laundry (mystery solved), I have a pretty good idea of the conclusion that a majority of my English speaking audience is going arrive at, and it does follow the Cytherean line of thinking. Which makes me wonder if they’re going to take it seriously. (Not that a sock stealing creature SHOULD be taken seriously.)
I also think Venusian could be “ugly” depending on how it’s pronounced.
In point of fact, “jovial” and “jovian” come from the same root. The Roman god Jupiter (aka Jove) was associated with good humor (and I don’t mean the men in the white suits who used to sell ice cream). As for “venusian” and “venereal,” recall that Venus was the goddess of love, mother of Cupid (aka Eros).
New question: what does “good, if not great” mean? When a review tells you that a book is “good, if not great”, do they mean:
The book is good, but it is not great.
The book is certainly good, and perhaps it is even great.
The book is certainly good, and it is probably also great.
The book is not just good, it’s great!
This is unclear to me, and it might even be unclear to a lot of the people who I have seen using the phrase. But what does it sound like to a native speaker?
I think most English speakers would probably use the expression to mean your second alternative: Certainly good, perhaps great. Perhaps it implies a little more than that (something between the second and third alternatives?). The idiom is not very precise, but I think it would be in that range.
Logically the construction ‘A if not B’, applied as it usually is to situation where B includes A. (e.g. you can’t be ‘great’ without also being ‘good’), means deductively that what is being described is definitely A and possibly B.
Traditionally, it is also used in this way. (Not that there is any necessary connection between logical and grammatical traditions - they just happen to coincide in this case.)
People who use ‘if not’ to mean anything except as above, are in my opinion, not using it in the traditional sense are instead inventing a usage of their own. Which happens.
I’d say it’s context dependent, but usually one of the first two alternatives, with odds varying depending on the words used.
“Steinbeck is a great, if not the greatest, writer” implies the possibility of greatest; “Paul is a decent, if not outstanding, dancer” would favor the A-but-not-B option.
I usually mean “good-but-not-great” when I use it.
There are many things that make U.S. politics confusing for a European, but the fact that some words just mean different things across the Atlantic is certainly one of the more important. I believe I have figured out some of it: American English “liberal” is the approximate equivalent of British English “progressive”; and American English “socialism” is the approximate equivalent of British English “communism”.
Over the past few months, I have increasingly gotten the feeling that another word with a different meaning in the U.S. than in Europe is “middle class”. One sees a politician telling an audience of unemployed factory workers that he wants to give tax cuts to the middle class – and I’m like, What do those guys care about the middle class? But that is probably because I misunderstand what the term means. Would I be right in supposing that in the U.S., the “middle class” is not something between the “lower class” and the “upper class”, but in fact means “not upper class”, which in turn means “not filthily rich”?
In America, as far as I can work out, ‘middle class’ is a flexible category that can mean a variety of things, including ‘everybody who is neither filthy rich nor on welfare’, ‘everybody who has a job’, and ‘everybody who can afford to be a homeowner’. This means that a substantial plurality of Americans can count as middle class or not, depending on who’s talking and what they’re trying to sell you.
Except possibly for “liberal,” I’m not sure that any of the cases you cite are differences in semantics per se. For instance, many Americans seem to think that “socialism” means absolute tyranny – which is probably why you think they use it to mean “communism” – but those same Americans are also willing to claim that an exemplar of that socialism is a health care plan which involves subsidizing individuals to by insurance from private companies, and imposing a tax penalty if they do not buy insurance (to avoid adverse selection problems), which they describe as a “nationalization” of the health care situation. This can’t merely be a definitional difference; it’s tied in with a whole complex of factual and normative beliefs that make it very difficult to untangle what’s going on.
It is true that in the US the phrase “working class” isn’t used, but other than that “middle class” is a big goo ball, hard to pin down to any single meaning and certainly not to any economic meaning. It may be that people aspire to the middle class, but I would also say that it’s impossible to untangle the usage of “middle class” in the US from delusions about the US’s degree of social mobility.
You could switch to Greek, and use Hermetic and Arean instead of Mercurial and Martian. The periodic table switches languages all the time, why can’t you?
No idea if Arean is etymologically related to Aryan. Probably the safest bet would be to use Hermetic and Martian.
True. For example, what in most countries would be called “fascism” is (in a development of the last few months) designated here in the US by a word that in the rest of the English-speaking world refers to a beverage. Ironically, most of those who subscibe to that particular philosophy have never tasted a properly-brewed cup of the stuff.
I’ve got to run and take cover now, since the thea synensists will soon be coming after me with their assault weapons fully loaded.
Middle class has a bunch of economic and social indicators that are “squishy”. I was raised in a family that expected me to go to college, and I went, so even though I earn only a little more than some people who would count as lower class, I’m firmly middle class, although I’d say I’m lower middle class. I have a job with health care and some security, and it’s unionized. There’s a reasonable chance the factory workers have those things, too, which is nothing to sneeze at. And if they’re in a two-earner household, there’s a good chance they’re not too far off from the median family income, especially if they were someplace like Michigan or Mississippi. The local factory workers here are in the same bracket as a moderately experienced school teacher.
I’d say factory workers could fall either way, depending on the prestige of the job, the risks and securities in place, and the pay.
It’s also good shorthand for “average American”, and politicians can get themselves into huge hot water by talking about the lower classes, because there’s a lot of unspoken assumptions about mobility and what it means to be lower class.
There’s a Beer Party?
Oh. Well, most Americans have never had proper tea. I like both proper and improper tea, and am essentially too lazy to go to the trouble of making the former when I find the latter drinkable. But I deeply regret the national horror that is Coors. (More evidence of my middle class status, I think.)
What you are missing is that Americans are indoctrinated to believe in the ‘American dream’ and to expect that whatever their current economic situation, it is about to change for the better, because they are supposed to ‘climb the career ladder’ and rise up through the capitalist structure. The truth is that the capitalistic structure makes this very difficult and that 99% of people will not rise up and that the middle class increasingly just doesn’t exist in America, but everyone believes that they are about to join it, next year. Therefore they don’t vote their actual interests, but rather what they mistakenly believe their interests will be in five years. It’s a very effective form of indoctrination, isn’t it? It results in loopy outcomes like unemployed people who live in their mom’s basement styling themselves as Libertarians and talking about survival of the fittest.
Ah, Calvinism. “Wealth is a gift given by God to the righteous. If you’re poor, God wanted you to be so because you’re obviously a bad person. But I’m not a bad person. I know I’m a good person, which means I must be destined for great wealth. Therefore, the smart thing for me to do is to vote for things that primarily benefit the wealthy.”
Interesting. Calvinism exists all over Europe, though. There is something uniquely American about buying naively wholesale into the notion that the upper classes want new joiners and are not doing everything humanly possible to prevent them from succeeding. It’s the revolution I think — it required a whole new round of mythmaking to the effect that the elites are no longer in charge, which is of course, bunk. And always has been.
What I believe the United States has, and Europe lacks, is the Prosperity Gospel movement of the middle 20th century. It goes a step or two beyond Calvinism, and underscores a great many of the ideas that are currently circulating in American politics.
It also teaches that every good Christian is entitled to material prosperity which will be delivered from above Real Soon Now. Which seems to encourage a great many people to bypass any question of whether the upper classes might want new joiners by simply counting themselves among the wealthy regardless of what is indicated by the available evidence.
Speaking strictly from the armchair and with no expertise, I’d say that the Prosperity Gospel is more of a symptom than a cause. The Prosperity Gospel was able to take root in the US because of our societal conviction that anyone can make it and virtue will be rewarded (materially), rather than producing that conviction.
In some ways there are a lot of parts of the American self-image that make it particularly receptive to the American Dream/Protestant Ethic (obviously I’m talking in huge generalities here). There’s the fact that we’ve never had a nobility or official hereditary aristocracy, and Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis that the frontier increased individualism and did away with old hierarchies; the thought that you could make a new life for yourself at the frontier. And if anyone can make it, when someone doesn’t make it it’s their fault. My guess is that this goes back to before the Prosperity Gospel.