invaluable » unvaluable

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

While some of the occurences are conscious plays on ‘invaluable’ for a sarcastic note, a lot are genuine. I suppose that once people have absorbed the counterintuitive use of ‘in-’ in the word, they start equating any negation of ‘valuable’ with it.

[Or so I thought… but ‘disvaluable’ in that sense is pretty much non-existent. I guess the phonetic closeness has a part to play too.]

| link | entered by Sravana Reddy, 2005/03/25 |

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