_wonky_ = "shady"?

[Jonathan Lighter]

Recent conversation:

Whippersnapper A: "We've been getting our house re-roofed for six weeks,
but the roofers left the job in the middle to start somebody else's."

Whippersnapper B: "We're dealing with really shady people."

Geezer: "You mean they're crooks?"

Whippersnapper B: "They're not crooks. They've got a five-star rating with
the Better Business Bureau. They're just not reliable."

Are these roofers wonky as well as shady?  Or are they neither?  Or what
are they? Do I care? My roof is fine.

JL



On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 10:30 PM, Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: _wonky_ = "shady"?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> What made you think the original post had "wonky" mean shady? I think
> it could be read to mean wonky.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Apr 17, 2012, at 10:06 PM, 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 Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 6:02 PM, Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> I understand "wonky" as "not quite right", ie, a cause for suspicion,
> not
> >> necessarily a judgment of character.
> >
> > The clearly far-less-than-obvious, apparently, point of the original
> > post was that _wonky_ is *possibly* being *used* to mean something
> > *like* "shady" *in this instance* and *not* to claim that le tout
> > monde now agrees that _wonky_ *has* such a meaning and here is
> > evidence in support of that claim.
> >
> > --
> > -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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