Deceptively used correctly or wrong

Question

Please Help. My girlfriend is mad at me.

The other day I went outside to take out the trash and although it was sunny outside a cool breeze blew through the air and made me chilly. Although it looked to be warm, in reality it was cold outside.

When I arrived back in the apartment she asked me how the weather was and I said it was deceptively cold outside. This cascaded into an argument about whether it was warm or cold outside and whether I had used the word deceptively in a correct fashion.

In the past I have heard deceptively strong. For instance the mother was deceptively strong - or she looked weak but was in reality very strong. Alternatively the bodybuilder was deceptively weak - or he looked to be strong but in reality could not lift a lot of weight. Deceptively hot coffee- a coffee that did not appear to be hot but in reality could be scalding.

The thought behind this was that the weather, the woman, the bodybuilder, or the coffee was being deceptive.

She argues that deceptively cold outside implies that in actuality it is warm outside because the coldness is being deceptive. She argues a deceptively rich man is someone who is poor (or modest in wealth) but pretends to be rich where as I read that as someone who is rich but pretends to be poor (or modest at a minimum).

She is ESL and has asked her ESL friends and they tend to say that I am incorrect, but have seen other examples where I am correct online.

Please Help

Answer 1

Sorry about the mix-up Bobby! (Relationships are tough; so is language). As a linguist I feel obligated to tell you that there is no 'wrong' answer. What matters more is how people actually use the language ('descriptive' grammar vs. 'prescriptive' grammar). So let's see how they use it.

Based on a very quick corpus search and some Googling, it looks like nearly every instance I found uses "deceptively cold" in the way that you've used it, including in a couple weather reports claiming it is "deceptively cold," so you better bundle up. So, you were right!

That said, if we look at a different usage of "deceptively" such as "deceptively simple" we find that there are more instances (at a glance) of the meaning that it looks simple, but it in fact is not. The usage of "deceptively" requires a contextual understanding of 'seemingness,' it seems, which changes depending on the use and context.

Of course, this makes language usage deceptively simple. I've heard that 90% of language is idiomatic, meaning any exact combination of words has its own specific meaning. (Then again I've also heard 50% of statistics are made up). So, sorry prescriptivist grammarians, the answer isn't that easy :)

Answer 2

I believe the first response from Peter is right on target! "Deceptive" means that someone was being deceived. If you THOUGHT the weather looked warm but it turned out to be cold, you were DECEIVED into believing it was warm when it was not. So it was "deceptively" warm.

What you should have said about the weather in that instance, if you wanted to comment on how cold it was, would be to say it was, "surprisingly cold" or "unexpectedly cold." "Unexpectedly" for example, expresses your intended meaning that you were expecting it to be warm but it was cold.

Answer 3

Ohh, interesting debate! Here's a great blog post from a couple of years ago on just this topic: https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2010/08/a-deceptively-tricky-word.html. The authors, two committed grammarians, show that the word "deceptively" is ambiguous and frequently understood in contradictory ways. In fact they recommend using it with caution.

That said, the Cambridge Dictionary is a reliable source that supports your interpretation--depending on the phrasing of your sentence: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/deceptively. According to this entry, the phrase "it was deceptively cold" does indeed communicate that the weather was colder than it appeared to be. However, a minor change to the wording transforms that meaning! If you said "it seemed deceptively cold" or "it looked deceptively cold", then the adverb "deceptively" would no longer describe the condition of the weather, but your perception of it. This is a tricky distinction, but it matters because now the phrase communicates that the weather was warmer than you perceived it to be. Hopefully that helps to clarify the cause for confusion surrounding this wily word!

Answer 4

Hi Bobby,

Unfortunately, you used ‘deceptively’ incorrectly in the sentence describing the weather being deceptively cold. If the weather looked warm at first but actually was/felt cold, then technically the weather was deceptively warm—in the sense that the weather fooled you into believing that it was warmer than it really was.

When used in sentences, ‘deceptively’ refers to the first of the two ensuing adjectives (‘hot’ vs. ‘cold’ in the case of your sentence) describing (in a contrasting manner) a person, place, thing, or event identified thereafter.

I hope this helps (and that you and your girlfriend no longer get into anymore arguments over anything at all)! Please let me know if you have any additional questions.