A dramatic 6-year-old tries her hand at shoveling snow
Posted: Fri Feb 24, 2023 4:08 pm
https://forums.chiffandfipple.com/
https://forums.chiffandfipple.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=114163
I never understood that expression. What does it mean?
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.oleorezinator wrote:It means that things went well due to luck.
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.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 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!
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.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!
One more thing, and then I promise I'll stop wittering: 'luck' isn't a verb.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.
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.benhall.1 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 5:23 pmOne more thing, and then I promise I'll stop wittering: 'luck' isn't a verb.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.
As they taught at IBM, any noun can be verbed.
Actually, that isn't one I've heard before. That doesn't mean it isn't in circulation here.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.