Saturday, November 6, 2010

Lucking Out

Tihar continues unabated - I'll give a run-down later, but at the moment I'm stuffed and suffering from sel roti overdose. Also, I have a question I need your help with!

Over lunch with a few friend the other day it transpired there were two very different opinions about the meaning of the term 'lucked out' that divided the group. Half of us firmly believe that it is a good thing to luck out, while the other half thought that it was a very bad thing to luck out.

I won't tell you yet which group I fell into, because I'd like your opinion first. Let me know via email, or in the comments below and I'll do some dictionary digging as well as some scouring of the web and see what I can come up with.

3 comments:

  1. Definitely a good thing!

    ReplyDelete
  2. it's a bad thing, if you've lucked out you've run out of luck. if you disagree lauren it means were not related and i'll be sad.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I would say that I pretty much always use it as a negative thing ("dude, you lucked out.") - but being rather fickle in my language use, I have happily had many conversations with people who use it positively ("dude, you lucked out!"). As my incredibly poor examples show, it's all in the prosody/punctuation.!.!
    Perhaps it is best reserved for situations where someone is telling you something and you are unsure whether they are happy about it or not ("I saw The Hoff the other day, but didn't get a chance to speak to him" "Dude, you lucked out?").

    ReplyDelete