Fancy meeting you here
Many words have several different senses. When a language loses certain senses of the word, the language can be left with mis-interpreted phrases. Case in point: I was watching a television program the other day, in which the following exchange occurred:
“Fancy meeting you here.”“It is, isn’t it?
The phrase fancy meeting you here obviously uses fancy as a synonym for imagine. But somehow the screenwriter lost sense of this definition, and somehow thought the common sentence was referring to the occasion being highly decorated or intricate; that is, the adjectival usage, new enough that it does not even appear in the 1889 Century Dictionary. You cannot very well imagine someone saying It’s intricate to meet you here or How highly decorated to meet you here!, but this apparently did not give pause to the screenwriter.
But I confess to perpetrating one of these myself, one which Geoff Nunberg calls attention to in his excellent book The Way We Talk Now. The phrase in question is polite society, which apparently employs an obsolete definition of polite meaning well-bred. And yet it my mind I have always pictured a society of people for which the entrance requirement is minding one’s manners. Certainly this is a democratic and American read on the phrase, but one cannot easily alter one’s progenitors; therefore polite society is one that the mass of us have no chance of entering. Fancy that.
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