Are Surprises Inherently Positive?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Nadine. I’m calling from San Antonio, Texas.

Welcome.

How are you today?

Doing well.

Great. What can we do for you?

My boyfriend and I were discussing a word the other day, and we kind of got into a debate.

The word surprise is the word we were talking about, because we were talking about how when certain things happen, I said, yeah, well, you can have a bad surprise. And he looked at me and says, no, you can’t. And I said, yes, you can. And I gave him some examples about, you know, simple things like, okay, I’m pregnant, and yeah, that’s a bad surprise.

Or you get somebody who maybe throws a surprise party for you, and you’re not expecting it, and maybe you weren’t prepared.

And so I was telling him, and he insisted that surprise is not, you can’t have a bad surprise.

And I disagreed.

So maybe you can kind of.

Well, Nadine, what’s his argument?

What would he have you say instead of a bad surprise?

I really didn’t understand.

Man, if you want to know the truth, I couldn’t understand him because I didn’t know where he was coming from with it.

Maybe he had a sheltered childhood and all the bad things were kept from him.

Well, you know what? He has an English degree, and I will give him credit. He’s very, very smart about a lot of words.

But I just disagreed on this because he said that he doesn’t feel that you can have a bad surprise because surprise is not bad.

And in my research, what I have shown is that over time people have associated the word surprise as being good, when in actuality it can be that.

So I just needed some experts as yourself to kind of hopefully give me support or at least clear it up for us.

So often on this show when we’re asked to arbitrate these cases, we’re a little waffly and wishy-washy.

I’m pleased to say that at this point you are 100% correct and your boyfriend is wrong.

That is totally awesome.

And I can prove it.

Thank you.

I’d love to hear more.

I can prove it with data.

Okay, here it is.

We’ve talked about corpora on the show. These are large bodies of text that are analyzed by computer programs that mark them for part of speech, and you can figure stuff out.

You can actually look at the relationships between words.

And so what I’ve done here is I’ve punched in the noun surprise, not the verb, and I found all of the adjectives that are most often matched with the noun surprise.

And here they are in order of frequency.

Big, pleasant, nice, nasty, huge, unexpected, unpleasant, welcome, hidden, delightful, unwelcome, sudden, shocking, unwanted, utter, rude.

So what we’re finding here, again, tons of negatives there.

Nasty is the number four.

The number four.

And that’s clearly a negative.

Big is arbitrary.

A big surprise.

You mentioned a baby.

A big surprise for a baby coming could be very good news or very bad news, depending on whether you wanted a family.

Right. And so so really any noun in our language can always be graded or adjusted or modified by a modifier, by an adjective or an adverb.

You can do things to any noun. There’s no inherently positive noun that can’t somehow be turned into at least a little more negative.

Right? Words don’t stand alone.

It’s all about the company they keep.

In the language, right? Context matters.

So we can look at a dictionary definition and it will guide us, but really the ultimate meaning of a word is how it is in a sentence, and so surprise is often associated with negative adjectives like unpleasant and unwelcome and rude.

Nasty.

So I will recommend that you look up the words BYU as in Brigham Young University Corpus.

And it will take you to this really complicated site that lets you analyze text. The instructions are there. You can actually do exactly what I did and look this up.

There’s a bunch of corporate to choose from. And you can actually match the adjectives, the noun, and show him this. And I think once he sees the data, he’ll be like, oh, yeah. All right. Maybe I didn’t consider this fully. Maybe da-da-da. I think he’ll get there.

I think he’ll arrive where you are already. He’ll catch up.

He’s very much into researching and data and things like that. So that’s why I figured calling you guys. In fact, it was his suggestion because we listen all the time. And it was his suggestion.

He says, you know what? Call him up. So I thought I would and I got lucky and here we go. Here we are.

So what is ode? Is there anything? We always ask this. What’s on the line here? I think I deserve a really nice vacation somewhere.

Oh, nice.

I think it’s about time.

Yeah, maybe he’ll surprise you.

San Diego in January.

Maybe? Yeah.

January could be a good time, absolutely.

All right. Nadine, thank you so much.

Absolutely. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Take care now. Bye-bye.

Take care, Nadine.

You too. Bye-bye.

Well, what’s the language debate that’s going on in your household?

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