"It is crispy and ridiculous!"

[Jonathan Lighter]

But seriously. The psychological trigger for laudatory "ridiculous" may be
that something is so astonishingly good, that if anybody had described it
beforehand, the normal, well-ordered mind would have scoffed.

Similarly, laudatory "outrageous" may embody the idea that squares would be
outraged at the brilliant, defiant audacity of the thing.

Of course, one of the first times I heard it, it was applied to a natural
landscape. But ignore that part.

JL


On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 10:57 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

> But maybe impressive athletic feats really are ridiculous.
>
> I mean in the scheme of things. You know, like big stock market movements.
> Do Zeus and Hera care?
>
> JL
>
>   On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 10:54 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>> Subject:      Re: "It is crispy and ridiculous!"
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> At 10:36 AM -0400 4/7/11, Neal Whitman wrote:
>> >Rachael Ray describing the focaccia she's taking out of the oven.
>> >
>> >And I thought it was weird to hear Randy Jackson on the last season
>> >of American Idol, complimenting a contestant's performance by saying
>> >it was ridiculous!
>>
>> The latter sounds like the usage that's become common (involving
>> adjectives I'd have thought of as negative in connotation, e.g.
>> "sick") on ESPN's SportsCenter to commend particularly impressive
>> athletic feats.
>>
>> LH
>>
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>
>
>
> --
>  "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
> truth."
>



--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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