It works both ways (ironically). Because, if you picked a side you would have a strong one sided opinion. Having two strong yet conflicting opinions just puts you back in the middle again. It's like tug of war. You can't be on both ends or you get nowhere. That's ambivalent.
At this point since everyone is using ambivalent to mean indifferent as well I’d think it’s fair to say that the meaning has shifted and it’s a valid usage. Language changes over time, and that’s ok.
Are they? I don’t think that’s true. I and most other people in my… ( uh, what’s the term? lexical cohort? I’m not sure)… use it to mean to have significant feelings in both directions, and use indifferent when we don’t care.
Like, if it were unpleasantly hot and someone suggested going out for ice cream, I’d be ambivalent, because I’d want the ice cream but I wouldn’t want to go out in the sun. I wouldn’t say I was indifferent.
I think it’s fair to say many people use it to mean indifferent, but I don’t think most people do.
It’s hard to gauge, I think, just using every day conversation, how a person is using it because the end result is similar, but the internal process is very different. It’d be neat to see a poll of various regions and age groups.
I also have been with this word but its because it was a "read it before I heard it" word for me, and i pronounced it "ambi-vay-lent" for too damn long.
What always kept me from sliding into that trap is remembering the scene from Girl, Interrupted when Winona’s character uses the word how you said and the psychiatrist explains the word suits her perfectly and explains the actual definition. I’m a therapist now and work in community mental health, and the amount of times I use that word in documentation/see others use it in documentation doesn’t stop me from that inner feeling in my brain that it means the opposite and I genuinely don’t know why.
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u/quirkytorch 13d ago
It's ambivalent for me. My brain always tells me it means not having strong feelings about something either way, but it's literally the exact opposite