Question

What does it mean when someone says that a person is “not half-bad”? Does it mean they are half bad and half good?

Answer 1

Hint: The phrase “not half-bad” means that something is surprisingly good.
Examples of the phrase: His singing is not half-bad. The food in the new restaurant is not half-bad.

Complete answer:
The literal sense of this phrase is that an individual is more than half decent, but this is not the popular understanding. This is the same as saying, "Wow, that's pretty sweet." The majority of people who use this term never pause to consider whether the topic is really more good than bad.

It's possible that, like most expressions, it began with the literal sense as the only meaning. Time, on the other hand, turns language into a telephone game. Someone says something, and someone who doesn't understand it assumes the meaning. When this happens repeatedly, phrases like "I couldn't care less" emerge. So, if you hear this word, just assume the speaker is complimenting something.

Examples of this phrase are:
His cooking is not half bad: This means that he cooks better than they expected.
Her driving is not half bad: This expresses that her driving is surprisingly better than they thought it would be.

Examples:
- His acting skills are not half-bad.
- The food that she cooked yesterday was not half-bad.
- In spite of her reputation, the new history teacher is not half-bad.
- Our last trip to the hill stations was not-half bad.

Note: It denotes that something is reasonably friendly or not as bad as one would have expected. This phrase is used to convey the surprise of something being more than the expectations.
The original expectation from the object is usually low.