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A comment on When to stop dating and settle down. Parent comment

Re:When to stop dating and settle down by Grishnakh on Tuesday February 16, 2016 @04:48PM (#11113374)
>I'm finding, at least -- that people who lie and cheat and who are generally bad actors are really hard to distinguish from those people who don't act like that.

This is a great example of how easy it is to misinterpret stuff in English.

If someone is really good at faking good character, doesn't that make them a "good actor"? :-)

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Re:When to stop dating and settle down by ionforce on Tuesday February 16, 2016 @05:03PM (#11113477)
We could say that the phrase "(good|bad) actor" has a high collocation, so that it has a higher likelihood of meaning something specific. Also, we could disambiguate by using alternatives like "poor actor" (bad at acting) and "bad agents" (immoral people).
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