{"id":650,"date":"2004-09-18T05:15:32","date_gmt":"2004-09-18T09:15:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/metasj\/2004\/09\/18\/words-for-medium\/"},"modified":"2004-09-18T05:15:32","modified_gmt":"2004-09-18T09:15:32","slug":"words-for-medium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2004\/09\/18\/words-for-medium\/","title":{"rendered":"Words for Medium"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a516'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8230; English don&#8217;t got none.  It&#8217;s hard to say in one word that something is <b>middling<\/b> or <b>mediocre<\/b> unless one is talking specifically about vague quality or ability.  Medium-large, medium-strong, middleweight (well, maybe that&#8217;s one word), of average thickness, neither slow nor fast, of average intelligence&#8230; is this because it&#8217;s not emphatic enough to say something is <i>middle-of-the-road<\/i>?  In politics it comes up so much in most any discussion that we not have &#8216;centrists&#8217;.  But how about medium-dark, medium-fair, medium-hard, mildly interesting, somewhat obscure, &#8220;in the middle-ground&#8221;?  <\/p>\n<p>The question might better be rephrased as, why do we have two words for most adjectives, one at each end of a supposedly linear spectrum, rather than one word for each adjective (as in <b>NewSpeak<\/b>), or three (as with &#8220;poor, average, good&#8221;)?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; English don&#8217;t got none. It&#8217;s hard to say in one word that something is middling or mediocre unless one is talking specifically about vague quality or ability. Medium-large, medium-strong, middleweight (well, maybe that&#8217;s one word), of average thickness, neither slow nor fast, of average intelligence&#8230; is this because it&#8217;s not emphatic enough to say [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-indescribable"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-au","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}