[Ads-l] "hinged"

[Ben Zimmer]

One from Carl Bernstein on CNN, where the contrast with "unhinged" is
explicit:

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1609/28/cnr.05.html
"Trump did very well, even temperamentally in a sense, in the first half
hour of the debate and then he lost it and became unhinged. He needs to
stay hinged if he can do it."


On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 3:34 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I've heard "hinged" used by one or two others in recent days.
>
> Same context, of course.
>
> JL
>
> On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 3:32 PM, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I like "false positive," but the term I've most often seen is "lost
> > positive." This was apparently coined back in the 1950s by one David
> > McCord, founder of The Society for the Restoration of Lost Positives:
> >
> > http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,890672,00.html
> >
> > The term was further popularized by William and Mary Morris (it shows up
> in
> > their 1975 Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage).
> >
> > Of course, "lost" implies that the positive once was found, but as Larry
> > can tell us, a lot of the positive forms are ex-post-facto
> back-formations.
> >
> > --bgz
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 2:45 PM, Geoffrey Nunberg <nunbergg at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > "This is not a hinged human being.” John Avlon on CNN, referring to…
> > >
> > > Like ‘gruntled,’ ‘kempt’ etc. What does one call these — just
> > > back-formations? I sort of like “false positives,” but I imagine that
> has
> > > already occurred to someone. Most things have.
> > >
>

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