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Chris -- 2025-05-10
From an online comment thread about a judge who was receiving money from a private juvenile prison company and sentencing thousands of juveniles to their facilities for tiny infractions:
This was an indespicable selfish moral abuse of public trust.
I don’t know if this guy was confusing “despicable” with “insufferable” or some similar word. Perhaps the negating prefix “in-” suggested to him, however unconsciously, negativity, so that he added it to “despicable” to make it even more strongly negative. Just a speculation. Has anyone here seen fallacious additions of negating prefixes such as “in-”, “a-”, or “de-” to words to intensify the negativity?
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