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A couple of weeks ago, Eric Baković posted about phrases of the form deceptively <ADJECTIVE>, and gave the results of an online survey of more than 1500 LL readers ("Watching the deceptive", 10/2/2011), who were each asked to interpret one of two phrases:

The exam was deceptively easy. The exam was deceptively hard The exam was easy. 56.8% The exam was easy. 11.8% The exam was hard. 36.0% The exam was hard. 84.0% The exam was neither. 7.2% The exam was neither. 4.2%

Eric suggested that this variability in judgments, and also the asymmetry between easy and hard, might be connected to the phenomenon of misnegation. And there were many other interesting observations and speculations in Eric's post and the 64 comments on it. But a simple tally of collocational frequency for the word deceptively suggests a couple of relevant factors that neither Eric nor any of the commenters noticed.

In the Google Books ngram dataset, the 100 most common adjectival values for X in deceptively X were (in descending order of frequency):

simple easy mild similar small casual complex low quiet difficult innocent benign soft gentle normal straightforward peaceful strong large high smooth bland clear sweet attractive powerful fragile modest beautiful familiar lazy placid pleasant short innocuous slow serene delicate tranquil ordinary dangerous obvious simplistic warm naive friendly complicated good frail subtle harmless sleepy hard quick thin solid neat healthy young slim transparent charming unassuming potent slight rich demure easygoing tough bright seductive tricky childlike positive neutral narrow natural modern realistic humble languid safe real brief heavy cheerful swift trivial stable clean alluring youthful slender reasonable lovely uncomplicated effective effortless optimistic boyish

Among the emergent properties of the terms on this list is the fact that nearly all of them are positively evaluated. We can see this from another angle by looking at the counts for some (approximate) antonyms:



good bad innocent guilty deceptively ___ 207 0 738 0

Or



sweet sour quiet loud deceptively ___ 240 0 815 0

And X=evil, villainous, bitter, noisy also have counts of 0.

Another aspect of this list that may be less obvious is what we might call the "milquetoast factor" or the "sandbagging dimension": words like bland and frail, in many contexts at least, might be less positively evaluated than quasi-antonyms like spicy and robust, and yet we have:



bland spicy frail robust deceptively ___ 308 0 146 0

Patterns like the following appear to have a similar source:



cool cold warm hot deceptively ___ 184 0 146 0

It's likely that these zeros are either floor effects, or artefacts of the fact that the Google n-gram collection discards less common n-grams (for n>1). Thus a general web search turns up quite a few hits for e.g. "deceptively spicy" or "deceptively cold", and so does Google Books. And we can't explain these effects in terms of the overall frequency of the adjectives in question, since cold is commoner than cool in this dataset (13.6 million vs. 4.1 million), hot is commoner than warm (9.8 million to 7.3 million), etc.

But still, deceptively does in general appear to collocate with adjectives that are metaphorically (and perhaps physiologically) mild as well as emotionally positive (or at least non-negative). This remains true in the face of some interesting exceptions, however:



benign safe dangerous deadly poisonous deceptively ___ 557 63 147 0 0

The case that Eric used in his survey — easy vs. hard — may not be as much of an exception as it seems. Simple and easy are among deceptively's commonest collocates, and so the fact that their opposites also have non-zero counts in the n-gram corpus may just be the expected luck of the draw:



simple easy difficult hard complex deceptively ___ 27,204 2,653 548 88 625

Of course, none of this changes the observation that deceptively <ADJECTIVE> can work out pragmatically in two quite different ways — things that are deceptively ADJECTIVE can be more ADJECTIVE than they seem, or less. Some corpus examples where things are more ADJECTIVE than you might think:

It may sound fancy, but this recipe is deceptively simple to prepare.

Hit the holiday party scene rocking one of these attention-stealing, deceptively easy looks and you'll be the girl giving everyone hair envy — guaranteed.

Getting around on Ilmatar was deceptively easy: take a bearing by inertial compass, point the impeller in the right direction, and off you go.

Here are 10 deceptively simple ideas for building your human connections that have helped employees of the companies that engage us for leadership coaching get to a whole new level of high performance.

Here are some others where things are less ADJECTIVE than they seem:

Flintknapping is a complex craft that appears deceptively simple to the inexperienced eye.

Like baking a pie, frying a chicken is a deceptively simple kitchen task with fearsome pitfalls.

Walt's arm moved in a deceptively easy movement and the big man staggered back.

Spectra that appear to be first order, but actually are not, are called deceptively simple spectra.

But if it's generally true that the oddball un-mild collocates like hard, dangerous, long, etc., tend more strongly to the "more X than it seems" interpretation than the typical collocates like easy, safe, short do — as Eric's survey results suggest — this may be connected to the fact that deceptively seems to have a preferred orientation with respect to such scales in general.

[I used Mark Davies' interface to the Google Books n-gram collection to get most of the numbers cited above.]

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