Canny/Uncanny

January 16th, 2009 by admin

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Posted in columns, January 2009 | 3 comments

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3 comments on this post.

  1. NHGranite:

    May 7th, 2011 at 4:03 pm

    I am going to venture another guess here. My grandmother was Scottish, and grew up in Blackburn, Lancashire, so more than one dialect was in her speech.

    If “canny” is knowing, and I think it is taken from “ken”, as in it’s beyond my ken, then to me “uncanny” is unknown or beyond knowing. Something weird means we don’t known how it originates or how it works, or uncanny – as in How did you do that? oooh witchcraft, we don’t know, unknown, uncanny. Spooky.

  2. Maja:

    November 10th, 2011 at 6:53 am

    Makes perfect sense, too. Maybe even more.

  3. xyz:

    November 16th, 2019 at 10:13 pm

    “(as in “inflammable,” meaning essentially the same thing as “flammable”).”
    -INCORRECT: Look up your Strunk & White or Eats, Shoots & Leaves. If you’re old enough to remember vehicles that transported “flammable” liquids were originally labeled as “Inflammable” or “Highly Inflammable”. I even asked my parents about it at the time b/c of my childhood level of understanding the negating prefix (“in”). The explanation then as now is that it’s the same as “priceless”: you cannot put a price on it, & thus you cannot set a “flame” to it. But, owing to mass ignorance of proper English (just as in “nauseated” vs “nauseous”) those trucks, as per last 30 yrs, are now labeled as “flammable”. Bottomline: the correct word is still “inflammable” but correcting others on this would become an unpaid part-time job.

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