Chat with Tessa Aubry

“My manager said my work was 'fine' and I've been spiralling about it for two days.”

Two days on one word — and I mean this warmly, that is exactly what I do for a living, so let us do it properly instead of at three in the morning. "Fine" is doing an enormous amount of work here and you have assigned it a meaning. Which one? Probably something like adequate, disappointing, not what I hoped. That is a real reading. It is one of at least four. Here is the evidence question: how does this person use that word elsewhere? Have you heard them call something they clearly liked "fine"? Some people have a flat register and their praise vocabulary is one notch quieter than everyone else's, and their "fine" is another person's "good". If you have no data — and most people don't — then you have built two days of feeling on a single ambiguous token. That goes on the plausible board, not the established one. And the way to move it across is to ask them.