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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2612 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 28, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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"Rate" seems to me like it is indeed used as you describe. Someone's accoplishments can "rate", or properly deserve, praise. A work of art can be "rated highly". There are plenty of industries in which saying that someone's job is to rate, or grade or assess, quality or purity would be perfectly logical.

I believe that "rueful" is both the true antonym for "ruthless" (not scrupulous) and actually a word for which the suffix change is fairly normal. Not sure why this one is slightly irregular... "faithful" exists, as does "shoeless", so the problem would appear to be with "ruthless". Perhaps "rueless" is just too wimpy a collection of sounds for this idea.

For abuse, I have always thought of it being the opposite of disabuse in that an abused person's thought process, etc, is being abused by incorrect notions. Thus, to disabuse is to free someone from a figurative abuser.

A fun example to add to the list (possibly) is inchoate, which means not fully formed. Apparently, lawyers do use the implied antonym choate, but Scalia has long criticized this because the "in" here is not in fact a negative prefix, so creating the implied antonym is nonsenical. Personally, I have always thought of coalesced as a good opposite. https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/law_dictionaries_accept_choate_although_scalia_has_long_disagreed

There is an archaic noun "ruth", which seems to mean the same thing as "rue". Many centuries ago it was a commonplace for Christian parents to name their children after Christian virtues they want them to embody, which is where the name "Ruth" came from: along with "Grace" it's the only such name which has really stuck around in Ireland. Some of these like "Hope" are more common in the states, and you'll sometimes encounter Nigerians called "Goodluck" ("Chastity" only gets used ironically by sex workers).

As you said, virtue names are uncommon, but by no means unheard of, in the US. Almost exclusively for girls, though Felix arguably counts as a virtue name for boys. For girls I've seen Hope, Faith, Grace, Mercy, Charity, Joy and Constance around, as well as one extremely out there example whose full name was Ever Lasting Love (apparently her parents were hippies, lol).

Hope, Faith, Grace, Mercy, Charity, Joy and Constance

Destiny, Trinity, Felicity, Harmony, Heaven (and Nevaeh), Serenity, and the aforementioned Chastity also come to mind for girl names in that direction.

There’s quite the Venn diagram intersection between virtue names (or virtue name-adjacents) and stripper names, whether due to hoeflation or the downward mobility of names.

What did she go by? Eva?

She went by Ever. It was unusual but you got used to it.

Good point on the Biblical Ruth, but that is supposed to mean friendship or friend, right? I think "ruthless" has to be a slant of "rue-less". Surely we dont have people out there naming their kids "Regret" as a desired virtue! (Well, actually maybe Hunger Games fans...)

Regret is a name, Sergeant. The name of one of the Covenant's religious leaders. A Prophet.

Dear humanity: we regret being alien bastards. We regret coming to Earth. And we most definitely regret the Corps just blew up our raggedy-ass fleet!

Oo-rah!

"Rate" seems to me like it is indeed used as you describe. Someone's accoplishments can "rate", or properly deserve, praise. A work of art can be "rated highly". There are plenty of industries in which saying that someone's job is to rate, or grade or assess, quality or purity would be perfectly logical.

But my point was that the adjectives "overrated" and "underrated" refer to instances in which the assessment of an item's quality was considered to be inaccurate, either too generous or too harsh, respectively. To me this implies that "to rate" something is to make an accurate assessment of its quality. But I don't think it really does carry this de-/con-notation: much as with "interpret", the verb "to rate" is equivocal on whether the resulting assessment was a fair or accurate one.

Hmm, I do think that "to rate" implies accuracy, even if a rating does not necessarily imply the same, perhaps a controversial take in performance review season, but I think of that as "giving ratings" rather than "rating".

But then this gives us the prefix issue of that it being clear that an undercooked dish has not been cooked enough and that an overcooked dish has been cooked too much, a common sense application of over/under. What, then, does it mean to do insufficient/excessive accurate assessment? (Since this was all still very common sense with cook, perhaps over/under are just not good prefixes for us to do this with at all.)

It's interesting again because the words "overrated" and "underrated" are only ever used in the context of qualitative assessments which are extremely subjective, namely those of artistic works. "Breaking Bad is an overrated TV show" sounds normal; "the bridge collapsed because the inspector overrated the quality of the steel used in its construction" sounds weird, even if that's literally what happened.

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