...Other than that guy at Atlas Obscura, but tenable and tenuous are not synonyms or even different forms of the same word. They have, in fact, very nearly opposite meanings.
I swear, you turn your back on a perfectly good language for five minutes, and the kids are spray-painting stuff all over it; only about ten percent of the additions and modifications come anywhere close to art.
Look it up -- especially if it feels like a clever turn of phrase. English steals words from all over, fools around with their meanings without due regard to origins and pays very little attention to fiddlin' details like inadvertent near-twin antonyms.
Stuff like this literally decimates me. ;-)
ReplyDeleteIt continues to amuse/amaze/confound me that, just in my short 85 years on Earth, some terminology has been totally flipped in meaning. (Tilting at windmills, I am still trying to teach the world the difference between "three times as large as" and "three times larger than".)
ReplyDeleteAnd when the kids are done, it's full of misspellings with no punctuation.
ReplyDeleteCop Car "three times smaller than" GAH!
ReplyDeleterickn8or And those are the journalists.
"Impact" has replaced affect and effect.
"Enormity" does not mean big, darnit!
We have lost the enormity front. It’s time to fall back and regroup.
ReplyDeleteThink we can hone in on something else?
ReplyDeleteTam & Roberta: Both of you stop it this instance! Staunch the flow!
ReplyDeleteSeriously, it seems that I'm seeing a big uptick in just plain bad writing in newspaper articles. Sure, an overworked editor can overlook the occasional sentence with a missing crucial word, but, c'mon, sometimes the scribblings approach incoherence.
I suspect the novice AI writing the article belongs to the same union as the novice AI editor.