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Chris -- 2018-04-11

#1 2011-05-27 20:26:42

burred
Eggcornista
From: Montreal
Registered: 2008-03-17
Posts: 1112

Good, bad or different

Heard today in the Extras reel of the movie Black Swan: ‘good, bad or different’. Indifferent was taken more or less intact from Latin in the early 16th c., and the phrase ‘good, bad, or indifferent’ had its hay day in the 1920s. “Good, bad or different” introduces a new category into the list: neither good nor bad, just different. More than 100 real ghits.

Triathlon forum
does anybody have any good bad or different opinions on these bikes

Travel forum
I hope people will share their actual experiences, good, bad or different.

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#2 2011-05-28 11:09:30

kem
Eggcornista
From: Victoria, BC
Registered: 2007-08-28
Posts: 2851

Re: Good, bad or different

The decline in the twentieth century of the objective sense of “indifferent” (e.g., “an indifferent hand of cards”) opens up the reformulation, I suspect.

The subjective sense of “indifferent” (e.g, “I am indifferent to your proposals”) has not seen, until recent decades at least, a similar decline. We could make a guess that the idiomatized parallel with “good” and “bad” made “indifferent,” increasingly taken in its subjective sense, an unhappy member of the objective trio, leading to the substitution of the persistently objective “different.”


Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.

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