Learn English – Is “She’s a corrigible flirt” a proper positive form of “She’s an incorrigible flirt”

word-choiceword-usage

  1. She’s an incorrigible (incorreggibile) flirt.

  2. She's a corrigible (correggibile) flirt.

In Italian language "incorreggibile", used like in "1" case, is a 'negative' word for which, strictly speaking, the 'positive' form doesn't exist.

In fact, in Italian language one cannot use the "2" sentence because it sound awkward. I'm not sure why, but I think that this happens because "1" example is a bit idiomatic.

Furthermore, always with regarding to Italian language, I'm not able to think of another word, different from "correggibile", that can express the 'positive' form of "incorreggibile".

So, I'm wondering if, in English language, "corrigible" can be used to express the 'positive' form of "incorrigible" in "2" case. If not, does another word exist? Or, in this case, are English and Italian similar?

Best Answer

Corrigible literally means correctable, while incorrigible literally means uncorrectable. From this, you might conclude that the two words are opposites.

However, most speakers don't think of incorrigible as defined in terms of corrigible. In fact, I would venture to guess that many speakers aren't familiar with the word corrigible at all! The two words have their own idiomatic patterns of usage, and they don't correspond in manner or frequency.

If you did say corrigible flirt, I think it would be interpreted in one of two ways:

  1. unidiomatic or incomprehensible; or
  2. wordplay, coining the word anew as a back-formation from incorrigible.

This sort of wordplay happens all the time, as when people re-invent the word gruntled (from disgruntled). It works because gruntled is an obsolete English word few people are familiar with. Likewise, corrigible is relatively unknown, and though it's not quite obsolete, it isn't generally used in this fashion. Because of this, I'd expect corrigible flirt to be interpreted as either novel or mistaken.

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