Wednesday, 20 May 2009

Word of the day

Today's word is negativish, which I believed that I had coined myself. Thank you to Katy for encouraging me to promote it. In fact, like many words which obviously need to exist, there are almost a thousand uses of this word - admittedly half of them Albanian - thrown up in a Google search already. Negativish means somewhat, rather, fairly, more or less, negative. It can be applied to an attitude or comment or action or work of art.

It is quite curious, however, that some users of the word insert a hyphen. Others put inverted commas around it. Or use italics. Why? I guess because they are uncertain that the word is right.

Use of the word can be illustrated -

"there's one negativish review (3 stars)"

"So why should a right to negative liberty be a negative right, i.e. a right that itself has something 'negativish' about it?"

"I have NOT got NO money" is about as "double negativish" as it gets."

And an Albanian example, where negativish has the same sense as negatively in English.
"Sidomos ka ndikuar negativish interview i Tom Cruise me Oprah Whinfrey ku Cruise eshte sjellur shume quditshem dhe si shkak tash perqeshet ..."

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