Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Mean
Our good friends at UNR Students for Liberty have a post discussing meanness. Reading the title, I immediately filled in the blanks and assumed Mr. Belmont was going to confess to making average arguments. However, he was only ardently defending his juvenile approach to debate. Alas. However, I was interested enough to look up mean in the dictionary.
We all know mean is the sum of a group divided by the number of members, in other words, the average.
But did you know that mean is also defined as inferior and poor? As in He has a mean and narrow understanding of human relationships.
BUT, mean also means excellent, very skillful or effective. As in He is a mean debator.
So, mean can describe anything along the continuum from crap to cream of the crop.
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One word with multiple, disparate meanings? That's mean.
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