_wonky_ = "shady"?

Dan Goncharoff thegonch at GMAIL.COM
Thu Apr 19 12:01:51 UTC 2012


In the world I live in, this isn't hair-splitting at all.

The reliability of a contractor refers to whether they show up when they
are scheduled to show up, and whether they meet deadlines. It says nothing
about the quality of the final job, nothing about whether the raw materials
seems to have fallen off the back of a truck, and nothing about whether the
job was completed after payment has been made.

As for "wonky", I take it as a word being used by a person who is
dissatisfied by something they don't understand well enough to explain to
someone else.

DanG


On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 12:03 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: _wonky_ = "shady"?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 10:05 AM, Jonathan Lighter
> <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Whippersnapper B: "They're not crooks. They've got a five-star rating
> with
> > the Better Business Bureau. They're just not reliable."
>
> Clearly, some hair-splitting has occurred.;-)
>
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
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>

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