Reliance on irony has also become an automatic defense when one has said something stupid. “I was just kidding, don’t you have a sense of humor?”

Yes, I do, in the presence of wit.

Future generation who don’t parade irony as stylistic elegance will have great difficulty understanding the writings of the present time.

Worthless: has no worth
Priceless: has no price, aka, you cannot set a price on it

The difference being that you set a price on something, you don’t set a worth on something. Either it is worth something, or it is not. If it’s not, it’s worthless. Something that doesn’t have a price must have a value that cannot be priced, thus very valuable. Something that is not valuable has the price of $0, or as the Spanish (and Norwegians, that’s me!) say, gratis.

Yeah, I think I need to get some sleep now… This post ought to do it!

According to a book of my reading (on the Oxford Dictionary - by the same man who wrote THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN) English has a vocabulary of over 450,000 words and short phrases. Other languages, such as French or German tend to fall into the 60,000 to 80,000 range. So English is both the most powerful, and the messiest, language on earth.

In the case of inflammable, which was the earlier word, folks feared that children and semiliterates might misunderstand it to mean that the subject it modified would not catch fire… so in the 1920s, the National Fire Protection Association began urging use of the newer word flammable in place of the ancient word inflammable (flammable dates only to 1813).

Evidently, the Brits are less prone to use flammable, inclining more towards inflammable; here in America, inflammable tends to be used figuratively — particularly in constructs such as inflammatory — while flammable is used for most literal purposes.

(I checked my memory against the 1994 Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, an invaluable diction companion. There is a new edition out, now called the Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage; but I worry about that word “concise”… does it mean fewer entries? I haven’t seen it, so I don’t know.)

Dafydd

In this case, the prefix “in-” is not negating the rest of the word; rather, it comes from the Latin in, meaning “to or toward”. (Xlrq’s analysis on this is correct.)

Another English oddity: “cleave” has two meanings that are direct opposites. One meaning is “to stick together” the other is “to split apart”. (No, I don’t know whether the Cleavers were a family that stuck together.)