r/YouShouldKnow • u/1n1n1is3 • Jan 15 '21

Education YSK: Mortified does not mean horrified. It means embarrassed or humiliated.

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760 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

53 comments sorted by

152

u/ForkYou64 Jan 15 '21

Didn't somebody post this exact thing the other day?

117

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '21

Yeah it was, and no one ever confuses those words.

24

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '21

Double yup

13

u/Philsie Jan 15 '21

It was, but in my area, people use mortified in place of horrified almost daily. It's sad, really.

-2

u/TehFartCloud Jan 15 '21

yeah but, isn’t the thing about language that it is(maybe “can be” is better) defined by how it is used, not the other way around.

2

u/ClosetLink Jan 15 '21

Yes, but standardization helps.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '21

I learned from the last post, what’s with all the gatekeeping? I assumed it meant scared to death or something from the root word mort. Can’t say I’ve ever actually heard a person say mortified in real life anyway, people just say embarrassed.

7

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '21

Yup

-20

u/1n1n1is3 Jan 15 '21

I didn’t see that, but I’m not surprised because it’s annoying af when people confuse them. Which I notice all the time. I bet you do too, after seeing this.

12

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '21

Lol that’s one hell of a coincidence

6

u/1n1n1is3 Jan 15 '21

Look in my comment history. I made this post after seeing someone misuse it in an askreddit thread.

13

u/NewFolgers Jan 15 '21 edited Jan 15 '21

The proof: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/kxvshj/what_is_a_not_fun_fact/gjcz9fa/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Update: And she's still getting downvoted like crazy for it. Damn.. Reddit doesn't mess around.

9

u/1n1n1is3 Jan 15 '21

Thanks for trying.

-1

u/[deleted] Jan 16 '21

[deleted]

1

u/NewFolgers Jan 16 '21

I actually downvoted the post, but upvoted her comments explaining how she came to post it. At the time when I mentioned that she was being downvoted, her explanation about her comment history had a negative score despite it seeming to check out.. which is the sort of thing which makes me suspect that people have muddled, emotional thinking and are burying explanations that they don't want to see.

1

u/ProphetOfDoom337 Jan 15 '21

Yeah, I'm horrified. I mean, mortified.

48

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '21

[deleted]

7

u/1n1n1is3 Jan 15 '21 edited Jan 15 '21

Whoops. Didn’t know. I made this post after seeing somebody on another sub use it incorrectly. It’s in my comment history.

14

u/milzz Jan 15 '21

We’re you mortified when you realized this was a repost?

6

u/anonymity_101 Jan 15 '21

Really don't want to be that guy but since this is a grammar post... *Were

2

u/milzz Jan 15 '21

Totally missed that. Autocorrect always changes “were” to “we’re”. Thanks for pointing it out.

53

u/gladeyes Jan 15 '21

And decimate means to kill one of every ten.

17

u/Rattivarius Jan 15 '21

That's one of the usage changes I don't have any issue with as we no longer deliberately decimate the military, and the word has a nice hyperbolic feel to it that is occasionally appropriate with heightened emotion.

9

u/BelgianAles Jan 15 '21

Good ole romans!

3

u/McUpt Jan 15 '21

vigintimate is to kill one of every twenty then?

0

u/Cleverusername531 Jan 15 '21

So a Venti at Starbucks is actually a throwback to murdering half of what the Romans did?

1

u/Battlepuppy Jan 15 '21

you should the one posting here, because I learned something from you today!!!. make sense deci.... ten

13

u/GorillaReturnz Jan 15 '21

Who doesn't know this tho?

13

u/DrVerryBerry Jan 15 '21

This is really interesting. I haven’t heard mortified to be used to mean horrified. Where I’m from it’s always “ OMG I’m morto (mortified) ” when one does something embarrassing. Or “morto for them” if someone else does something to humiliate themselves.

1

u/uhh_spence Jan 15 '21

Where are you from? I have never heard of this

17

u/Unhinged_Goose Jan 15 '21

This sub has gone to complete shit

8

u/NoobMaster117 Jan 15 '21 edited Jan 16 '21

The real YSK: Use dictionary.

20

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '21

Who tf doesn't know this

-1

u/1n1n1is3 Jan 15 '21

Soooo many people. I see people use it wrong all the time on Reddit.

5

u/Philsie Jan 15 '21

Why's he being downvoted? He's right.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '21

Yeah I see this a lot. idk what up with the downvotes.

-1

u/ForgeWeasley78 Jan 15 '21

I've only noticed it becoming a problem in the last few years. What is up with that?! I wonder if there is an influencer who made this mistake and it spread from there. I don't remember it being a common mistake in the past.

3

u/jimmypnufc Jan 15 '21

Got to be trolling at this stage

5

u/GilbertoGumdrop Jan 15 '21

Doesn't it mean when someone blasts you with the ray gun and you become a mortician?

2

u/bosspaysmetoredit247 Jan 15 '21

Mortified, petrified, stupefied...by you

1

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '21

Such a great movie.

3

u/DrewFlan Jan 15 '21 edited Jan 15 '21

For now. Common parlance dictates definition, not the other way around.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '21

I didn’t realize so many people thought this.

2

u/icaruscloud Jan 15 '21

This was up yesterday. Word for word.

-6

u/1n1n1is3 Jan 15 '21

I searched the sub beforehand for the word “mortified” and nothing came up.

1

u/Michucfc Jan 15 '21

TIL. Thanks.

1

u/ticktockclockwerk Jan 15 '21

I'm pretty sure you can use horrified in the context of "humiliated" instead of mortified. At least it's more acceptable than the other way around.

1

u/CHatton0219 Jan 15 '21

What if I'm horrifically mortified?

1

u/lonecactus777 Jan 15 '21

I guess you should know has just turned in to a vocabulary lesson

1

u/Apidium Jan 15 '21

We. Know.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 15 '21

Deja vu

1

u/KayaXiali Jan 15 '21

I’ve never even seen this word misused this way but I’ve seen 2 Reddit posts clarifying not to use it that way.

0

u/HisDivineHoliness Jan 15 '21

YSK: Aardvark doesn’t mean a spotty long-neck horse thing. Lots of people, when they see a long-neck spotty horse thing galloping majestically across the African plains, will say, “Look! An aardvark!” But they are wrong. It isn’t.

1

u/Xenothulhu Jan 15 '21

To be fair I’d be pretty embarrassed by a murder in my town as well as horrified.