Good and evil

MJGR   Tue Sep 06, 2005 2:29 pm GMT
I am from Spain and I have observed that, in Spanish and English, words like good (bien, bueno in Spanish) or evil, bad (mal, malo) have two different meanings.

One of them has a moral side (a good person, a bad action, the axis of evil...) while the other is more prosaic (a good car, a bad car).

I would like to know if this pattern is repeated in other languages or not.
And, if anybody has a theory to explain the phenomenom, please, share it.
Adam   Tue Sep 06, 2005 6:41 pm GMT
French and Italian must be like that.

Italian -
"Una bella donna" - "A beautiful woman"
"Una bella macchina" - "A beautiful car."
american nic   Tue Sep 06, 2005 9:39 pm GMT
Adam, I don't think that's what MJGR means.

For good, there is one umbrella definition: 'good looks', 'good time', 'good taste', etc.
and another one: 'good person', 'good intentions', 'good doctor', etc.

And there are the opposite two umbrella definitions for bad.

Whoa...for a second there, I had a moment where the word 'good' just looked and sounded wrong to me for some reason...it seems normal now...I wonder if there's some technical or French term for that, where a word temporarily seems wrong if you repeat it multiple times...nevermind...

Anyway, good question, I'm not sure if that's universal, or only found in European languages...