Does “Eventful” Have a Negative Connotation?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

This is Joanna from Dallas, Texas.

Welcome.

And English is not my first language, so I pick up words in daily conversation from here and there.

But sometimes I don’t have a full grasp of the words.

So my question today is, I try to get a better understanding for the relationship of the word event and the eventful.

So to me, the event is something like, to me it’s more positive, maybe neutral.

So like you guys come into the town for a seminar or like a singer come for a concert.

So kind of the thing I want to go and wish for I can be part of it.

And then one day when I was kind of going to the hospital for surgery and stuff, so I heard a lady was telling me about it, said, oh, good luck on tomorrow’s surgery, and I hope it’s not eventful.

So I would think about, okay, so I kind of understand what she meant, but I don’t have a full grasp.

I said, maybe that’s kind of have a negative sense of the eventful there.

And then so she just hope everything goes well.

So then I would just say next time I got the opportunity, I start using that term.

I say, okay, so another lady went for some checkup and stuff.

So I say the same thing.

I say, I hope it’s non-eventful.

And then she paused a little bit and said, oh, that’s a good way to put it.

So I was thinking about maybe it’s not right how I use it.

So that’s why I say let me call them to figure out what’s the right way to do it.

That’s a really good question.

So your question, if I can summarize, is eventful usually negative and event kind of neutral?

Yeah, yeah.

You know, we can take both of these words and we can punch them into a big database called a corpus.

And what a corpus is, is a collection of text where a computer program has gone through and marked all the parts of speech, all the nouns and adjectives and verbs and so forth.

And so if I punch these two words, eventful and event, I can see which adjectives are associated with them and whether they’re negative, positive or neutral.

And so I’ve done that.

And what I’ve determined here is that they’re both context dependent, which is usually they’re neutral.

So we had an eventful trip could mean the ski lodge was beautiful and he proposed marriage and the dinner was very good and we caught our train on time.

And an event could be a funeral, but it could also be a wedding, right?

I looked up the negative adjectives to see if eventful was more negative or event was more negative.

And the adjectives are different.

And I think that’s what we’re hearing here.

There are different kinds of negative associated with these words when there’s any kind of negativity at all.

So, for example, eventful is associated with strange, turbulent, tragic, tumultuous, arduous, and chaotic.

An event is associated with unanticipated, reportable, traumatic, and negative.

In short, they’re both generally neutral, but they’re context dependent.

It’s the company that they’re keeping.

So in the hospital, you don’t want an eventful surgery.

You want a boring surgery.

Uneventful would be really good if you’re going to the hospital.

But if you’re on a honeymoon, perhaps you want an eventful honeymoon.

Perhaps you want to get a discount on the boat trip and you want the, you know, free meals at the restaurant and you want somebody to loan you their Cadillac so you can drive around.

I don’t know what an eventful honeymoon is like.

But maybe that’s what I’m going to say.

Great information, yeah.

That gives us very deeper analysis about the words.

I can understand better, and next time I use it, I’m more confident how to use that word.

It sounded like you used it just great when you said that in the hospital, when you repeated that words about you hope they have an uneventful surgery.

That’s exactly right.

That sounds right to me.

And, Joanna, what I love about your question is that I’d never really thought about that before.

And when we get people who speak English as a second or third or fourth language, a lot of times we get these things held up to us that we never had thought about before.

It reminds me when you think your house is clean until your mom comes over and your mom sees your house very differently.

And you do too because you start seeing things through your mom’s eyes.

Yeah.

So thank you so much for calling.

Yeah, thank you.

So thank you so much.

I feel like I hit Lotto to get to talk to you guys.

We’ll call us again sometime.

So do we.

This Lotto is easy to win.

Take care.

Thank you so much, Paul.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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