Deceptively valuable
A couple of weeks ago, Eric Baković posted about phrases of the form deceptively <ADJECTIVE>, and gave the results of an online survey of more than 1500 LL readers ("Watching the deceptive", 10/2/2011), who were each asked to interpret one of two phrases:
The exam was deceptively easy. | The exam was deceptively hard | |||
The exam was easy. | 56.8% | The exam was easy. | 11.8% | |
The exam was hard. | 36.0% | The exam was hard. | 84.0% | |
The exam was neither. | 7.2% | The exam was neither. | 4.2% |
Eric suggested that this variability in judgments, and also the asymmetry between easy and hard, might be connected to the phenomenon of misnegation. And there were many other interesting observations and speculations in Eric's post and the 64 comments on it. But a simple tally of collocational frequency for the word deceptively suggests a couple of relevant factors that neither Eric nor any of the commenters noticed.
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