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A dramatic 6-year-old tries her hand at shoveling snow

Posted: Fri Feb 24, 2023 4:08 pm
by Nanohedron

Re: A dramatic 6-year-old tries her hand at shoveling snow

Posted: Fri Feb 24, 2023 4:35 pm
by Tunborough
That's exactly how I felt yesterday, tackling the mix of snow, ice pellets, and freezing drizzle that landed on us overnight.

Re: A dramatic 6-year-old tries her hand at shoveling snow

Posted: Fri Feb 24, 2023 9:46 pm
by Nanohedron
I have to say we lucked out - getting dumped on aside - because our precip was all powder. Great for skiing, but rubbish for snowballs. Makes the roads "greasy", too. If it had been only an inch or so you could've used a broom on it, but we had a lot more than that. The official measure for Mpls was 13 inches, but since most of it was blowing sideways it's hard to be accurate, so I think they just threw up their hands and took a wild if modest stab at it; judging by my car I'd say we had more, easily. Snowblowers were firing that stuff a mile - a sight to behold - and shoveling was a comparative breeze, but even so, looks like the little kid's gotta get a bit bigger yet.

Re: A dramatic 6-year-old tries her hand at shoveling snow

Posted: Sat Feb 25, 2023 2:55 am
by benhall.1
Nanohedron wrote: Fri Feb 24, 2023 9:46 pm I have to say we lucked out
I never understood that expression. What does it mean?

Re: A dramatic 6-year-old tries her hand at shoveling snow

Posted: Sat Feb 25, 2023 8:58 am
by oleorezinator
benhall.1 wrote: Sat Feb 25, 2023 2:55 am
Nanohedron wrote: Fri Feb 24, 2023 9:46 pm I have to say we lucked out
I never understood that expression. What does it mean?
It means that things went well due to luck.

Re: A dramatic 6-year-old tries her hand at shoveling snow

Posted: Sat Feb 25, 2023 12:40 pm
by Nanohedron
Apologies, Ben. I knew it was a purely Left Pond idiom, but I assumed context would make everything clear.
oleorezinator wrote:It means that things went well due to luck.
Yeah, it's like "got lucky" without the spicy element. It also implies narrowly evading a negative outcome, often without any intent on the subject's part. It's like that fellow in the news who nonchalantly got out of his car, and right then a massive falling boulder crushed it. As we would say, he definitely lucked out. It can also be used diffidently, in response to congratulations on a success: "Ah, I just lucked out, that's all." You want to be pretty careful of telling someone else they lucked out, though: it could be taken as a denigration, for as we see, it can easily imply that an achievement was undeserved. The phrase's construction suggests to me that luck got one out of what could have been an undesirable situation. In the interests of brevity we use a noun here as a verb, and there you are.

Originally, though - WWII, I believe - the meaning was the exact opposite: one's luck had run out. Somehow it got turned around at least by the time I was young, and this more auspicious colloquial usage has consistently been the only one I've ever encountered for the phrase as it exists now. Maybe it'll change back again some day.

Re: A dramatic 6-year-old tries her hand at shoveling snow

Posted: Sun Feb 26, 2023 4:27 am
by benhall.1
Nanohedron wrote: Sat Feb 25, 2023 12:40 pm Originally, though - WWII, I believe - the meaning was the exact opposite: one's luck had run out. Somehow it got turned around at least by the time I was young, and this more auspicious colloquial usage has consistently been the only one I've ever encountered for the phrase as it exists now. Maybe it'll change back again some day.
I think that's why I've always struggled with the phrase whenever I hear it (exclusively, of course, from Americans). It sounds as if it should mean the opposite to what you mean by it. I suppose it's not a surprise that, in fact, it did mean the opposite at one time. Maybe it's a bit like the awful current trend of Americans saying, "I could care less," when they mean the opposite.

Re: A dramatic 6-year-old tries her hand at shoveling snow

Posted: Sun Feb 26, 2023 12:55 pm
by Nanohedron
benhall.1 wrote: Sun Feb 26, 2023 4:27 amMaybe it's a bit like the awful current trend of Americans saying, "I could care less," when they mean the opposite.
I don't think so. "I could care less" is just plain structurally confused because it doesn't support its intended meaning, and is therefore clearly grammatically wrong; whereas we see that "lucked out" can be open to interpretation, apparently has been, and I think my interpretation of the modern usage is quite sound, otherwise it would have no meaning for me, and I couldn't support it. Trust me, it's been the Yank meaning for a good while, no question, and in an earlier time it would have been considered "men's speech". It isn't dissonant in our "dialect", if you will, and that isn't due to being thickwitted; all vernacular is parochial. Now if instead you meant that as with "could care less", mere carelessness might also have caused the change in "lucked out", I'm in no position to know, but the difference is that where one subjectively works (to Yank ears), the other objectively doesn't (by its illogic). Arguments to the contrary acknowledged. But there are many formations where "- out" idiomatically propels the meaning, yet there don't seem to be any rules for its direction: for example, to cash out doesn't mean you run out of money, but you convert assets to money, as when withdrawing from a gambling game (by extension it can also mean someone has died); if something is tricked out, it's not that it was tricked or ran out of tricks, but that the bling, bells and whistles were not spared. "Chill out" doesn't mean one has lost one's cool, but that one relaxes. If an outdoor event is rained out, it means a cancellation due to rains, not that the rains have ceased. If a spot is hunted out, it means there is no game left, but we can also hunt something out in the sense of a search; however, if something is farmed out, it doesn't mean the soil is depleted as one might think, but - and this is far afield, no pun intended - it's when a job is assigned to auxiliary sources. Agriculture would only be incidental here, and not implied. The first meaning would be considered uninformed, but it draws on a class of like idioms that are really useful when one reaches one's limit: if I've had enough coffee I would say I'm coffeed out, or if I'm tired of playing frisbee, I'm frisbeed out. When I went to the Carlsbad Caverns the experience was so overwhelming that in the end the grandeur ceased to impress anymore, and I said - and still say - that I was caved out. The possibilities are not endless, but close to it. These would parallel the WWII meaning of "lucked out". Today's meaning for that one, though, isn't wrong; it's just through a lens that the idiom's form has allowed. Let us remember that "egregious" was once a compliment. The "- out" forms appear inherently elastic, and it's only custom, not logic, that keeps their meanings intact. We've seen that many of these outwardly similar-seeming examples are actually viewed through different and even contrasting lenses, not simply the same one for all, for their bones don't have enough meat to sustain - much less justify - a grammar-driven approach; after all, where do we start? In any case, that horse has long left the barn. It's the poetry of Yanklish. Our shibboleth. For me there's nothing outrageous about this state of affairs, but you do need familiarity for any of it to make sense, because from your angle, my Right Pond friends, I suspect none of it does!

Re: A dramatic 6-year-old tries her hand at shoveling snow

Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2023 2:33 pm
by benhall.1
Nanohedron wrote:For me there's nothing outrageous about this state of affairs, but you do need familiarity for any of it to make sense, because from your angle, my Right Pond friends, I suspect none of it does!
I must admit, even after you and oleorezinator have explained it to me, I'm still always going to struggle to remember which way I'm supposed to interpret "lucked out". Ah well. Thank you both for trying.

Re: A dramatic 6-year-old tries her hand at shoveling snow

Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2023 2:47 pm
by Nanohedron
Just so you know what MY meaning is, and that "ran out of luck" is not it. Ever. I try not to be too free with the idioms, but every now and then things like this happen. Yet I welcome these opportunities, because they force me to make sense of my own vernacular. :)

What is the function of "out", here? In most cases it's a figurative intensifier of sorts, but that's not all of it. Where's a philologist when you need one?

Re: A dramatic 6-year-old tries her hand at shoveling snow

Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2023 4:23 pm
by Tunborough
Here, too, "lucked out" would refer to achieving a fortunate outcome. I would say it could apply to both avoiding an unwanted outcome, like not getting the freezing rain that was forecast, or achieving a wanted outcome, like scoring tickets to see a coveted artist in concert.

Re: A dramatic 6-year-old tries her hand at shoveling snow

Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2023 5:39 pm
by Nanohedron
I suspected the US shared this with Canada. Normally we don't even think about it; it's just part of how we frame the world.

Re: A dramatic 6-year-old tries her hand at shoveling snow

Posted: Wed Mar 01, 2023 5:23 pm
by benhall.1
Nanohedron wrote: Mon Feb 27, 2023 5:39 pm I suspected the US shared this with Canada. Normally we don't even think about it; it's just part of how we frame the world.
One more thing, and then I promise I'll stop wittering: 'luck' isn't a verb.

Re: A dramatic 6-year-old tries her hand at shoveling snow

Posted: Wed Mar 01, 2023 7:17 pm
by Nanohedron
benhall.1 wrote: Wed Mar 01, 2023 5:23 pm
Nanohedron wrote: Mon Feb 27, 2023 5:39 pm I suspected the US shared this with Canada. Normally we don't even think about it; it's just part of how we frame the world.
One more thing, and then I promise I'll stop wittering: 'luck' isn't a verb.
Yes, of course. But in vernacular, it's used as if it were. English is flexible that way, and both sides of the Anglospheric Pond do this verbing-of-nouns thing; it's just that when we come up against a curiosity that we call it wrong out of reflex. It didn't get called North American English for nothing. :)

Here's a common one you'll hear in the States: "Beer me." If Canada doesn't have this one, I'd be dead surprised. :party:

Re: A dramatic 6-year-old tries her hand at shoveling snow

Posted: Wed Mar 01, 2023 7:36 pm
by Tunborough
benhall.1 wrote: Wed Mar 01, 2023 5:23 pm One more thing, and then I promise I'll stop wittering: 'luck' isn't a verb.
As they taught at IBM, any noun can be verbed.
Nanohedron wrote: Wed Mar 01, 2023 7:17 pm Here's a common one you'll hear in the States: "Beer me." If Canada doesn't have this one, I'd be dead surprised. :party:
Actually, that isn't one I've heard before. That doesn't mean it isn't in circulation here.