"sketch out"

[Ben Zimmer]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 11:16 AM, Amy West wrote:
>
> Heard in the wild last night on the Marketplace story about John McAfee
> (of antivirus fame):
>
> He started carrying around a gun and this "really sketched people out."
>
> http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/web-pioneer-john-mcafee-caught-murder-mystery
>
> I've become familiar with the "creepy" sense of "sketchy" because that
> seems to be the first sense that comes to my students' mind when I use
> it (while the "vague" sense is what I intend), but now here's a
> corresponding verb with particle, where "sketch" seems to have replaced
> "freaked."

See my 2010 On Language column, "Creeper! Rando! Sketchball!":

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/magazine/31FOB-onlanguage-t.html
"And just as you can be creeped out by a creepy person, you can be
sketched out by a sketchy person."

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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