I think it is an ambiguous category. At least to native (American) English speakers and heathens like me. The only evidence I can offer of this is that in my language culture, I routinely hear "spicy hot", and often enough when one should simply say "spicy", anticipate the question "spicy hot"?
That qualifies as a circumlocution to me. BTW, I didn't think you Greeks learned Latin since all the classy Romans wanted to speak Greek ;-)
Ah, that's a good point. I'm sure I've heard that question often- "spichy hot?". Kind of like "funny weird or funny ha-ha?".
>> That qualifies as a circumlocution to me. BTW, I didn't think you Greeks learned Latin since all the classy Romans wanted to speak Greek ;-)
Oh, actually I learned some Latin in high school, most of which is now forgotten. But, I was surprised by that turn of phrase myself: I was trying to translate from the Greek in my head to English and suddendly a bit of Latin fell out :)
Edit: Also, to be fair, I love surprising my native English speaker interlocutors with weird little bits of English they never use and which I know because I first learned English not as my everyday language, but from books and textbooks. It helps that some of those weird bits are well, Greek. e.g. I surprised my thesis advisor the other day when I used the Greek plural of "lemma", "lemmata" which turns out to be perfectly correct English, although it's not often used. My advisor suggested I refrain from using such obscure words in papers since most reviewers would probably be confused by them and be annoyed at me- and you don't want to piss off reviewers!
I think it is an ambiguous category. At least to native (American) English speakers and heathens like me. The only evidence I can offer of this is that in my language culture, I routinely hear "spicy hot", and often enough when one should simply say "spicy", anticipate the question "spicy hot"?
That qualifies as a circumlocution to me. BTW, I didn't think you Greeks learned Latin since all the classy Romans wanted to speak Greek ;-)