Learn English – “Have no inclination where they are”

meaning-in-contextword-meaningword-usage

I heard in a YouTube clip a line repeated several times:

I have no inclination where they are right now.

I have no inclination of where she is.

I don't have no inclination of where she is.

Inclination means preference, tendency. But here it appears to mean idea/clue, as in I have no idea/clue where they are. Dictionaries don't have this meaning. Nor can I find a similar example sentence in dictionaries. What does it mean here exactly? Is the usage by the man in the video a mistake?

Best Answer

This is an established use.

See also here ("I had an inclination where it had come from") or here ("without the slightest inclination of her whereabouts".)

or here:

The Poltergeist is about patience, planning, and high risk high reward gameplay. Being able to ambush survivors while they have no inclination of your whereabouts is a surefire way to shake up a game, especially if the survivors have NO IDEA the poltergeist is the chosen killer.

When someone has told us that they have no idea in which direction a person has gone, we might pursue the matter a little further and ask them to make an intelligent guess, based on whatever knowledge they may have to bring to bear on the question.

Well, which way would you lean? North? South?

That's what to lean means in this context, "to make an intelligent guess, based on whatever (small amount of) knowledge one may have or based on the probabilities."

And that's what to be inclined and to have an inclination means too.

I'm inclined to think they went South.

My inclination is that they went South.

I have no inclination where they went.

When a person says that they have no inclination, they mean that they cannot even begin to "lean" in one direction or the other. They have no information whatsoever that would lead them to think or favor one thing instead of another.

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