words with contradictory meanings

cleave

ambivalent

before

weather

secreted (bit fo a cheat?)

Don't get "weather"?

inflammable

"Inflammable" has just one meaning.

"ridden" confuses me

like, you might think that a flea-ridden dog would be a dog who'd been ridden of fleas, but it is in fact a dog which is still being ridden by fleas

perhaps this is only confusing in my worry-ridden head

I thought "ridden" in that sense came from "ride", i.e. worries are riding your head.

to weather something is to get by without significant damage, but if something is 'weathered' it's usually quite badly dmaaged

just imo

Ok, that clears it up.

I think you're right, Tuomas, but the two verbs have the same past participle - admittedly there isn't really an overlap in usage, but

Bedridden - being ridden by beds

I think it's supposed to be metaphorical: you're "ridden" by something, i.e. it takes over you - like a loa riding a Voodoo priest.

ridden
mid-14c., pp. of ride (q.v.). Sense evolution, via horses, from "that which has been ridden upon, broken in" (1520s) to, in compounds, "oppressed, taken advantage of" (1650s).

guilt-ridden, bed-ridden, etc

sanction

"Inflammable" has just one meaning.

Properly yes, but it's often misused to mean "not flammable"

damnit there was an xword clue where the answer was a word which meant cut or join, and wasn't cleave. but i can't remember what it was.

dock!

Figurative

fast

What meanings of "fast" are contradictory?

c'mon now you can't do this every time

stuck fast

damnit there was an xword clue where the answer was a word which meant cut or join, and wasn't cleave. but i can't remember what it was.

clip?

stuck fast

But the it's the "stuck" part here that's contradictory, not "fast".

xp nah i answered myself up there, it was dock. how does clip = join?

(8) firmly fixed in place; not easily moved; securely attached.

(xp)

sanction

AWESOME example

ledge - "paper clip"

"Fast" in that sense just means "tightly", which is not in direct contradiction with "fast", meaning "speedy".

xp nah i answered myself up there, it was dock. how does clip = join?

when you clip things together, eg with a paperclip

i used to know loads of these. "cleave" is the classic imo.

dyke

wear

... similar to weather

funny how "old" can mean "young" in some contexts.

If I talk about "the old me", I'm referring to the way I was in the olden days, when I was young.

^ kinda how 'before' works in my head

hmm, I don't q

*hmm, I don't quite follow you, darraghmac

well your future is before you, but you can also look back on something that happened 'before' now

literal

^ nah, there's actually a thread on how this is just misused

ha as there is for 'actually', actually

PRESCRIPTIVIST!

xxxp ah, clever

boned

skim

suck

haha i didn't see boned. i suppose this works in the same way.

skim

― Chaim Poutine (NickB),

losing you here tbh- as in 'to read quickly'?

maybe because skimming the ingredients vs. reading them makes you fat and skimming yr milk makes you thin

^ needed on crossword puzzle thread

cross? hurt irt friendship vs. help irt football

really scraping teh bottom of my headbarrel here

I suppose "doing the laundry" can result in either clean laundry or dirrty laundry, depending on how you interpret the verb.

skim - to take away some of the surface layer OR to add to the surface layer ('skimmed with ice' or a skim of plaster)

piece/peace (as in, carrying a piece vs. world peace)

again, streeeeetch armstronging this

apology

barely - "just enough to get by" versus "not quite enough to get by"

hah, I feel like there are a lot of these in English because it feels like I come across them all the time but when it came time to double down and start the topic I could only think of one

:(

custom?

hmm 'barely' just means for it to be close either way.

thread could get vicious if we all start to nitpick though

draw?

To draw on something (e.g. a cigarette) is to take something from it while to draw on something (e.g. a piece of paper) is to put something on it.

re: the fast discussion above, if "the door is fast" it can have opposite meanings -- if you are talking about a traditional door, eg it probably means it's stuck and something not moving can't BE any slower, whereas if you are talking about a grocery store automatic door it probably means it opens with the rapidity of an automatic door on the uss enterprise.

xxxxxp i don't think barely works because the words after it make it opposite, ie. i barely made the bus vs. i barely missed it. you could explain pretty much any adverb as contradictory by that logic. unless i am missing something?

xxp i should type faster

blow

apology

― "It's far from 'lol' you were reared, boy" (darraghmac), Thursday, 29 July 2010 13:46 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I like this, 'sorry I did something wrong' vs 'fuck you I did nothing wrong'.

how about rent? Seems that both positions in the state of affairs are described as renting.

invaluable is probably with inflammable as one of the 'yes we know but everyone knows what you mean by it'

rent, lease, lend all the same there, yeah

does resign count? you have to pronounce it differently to get the other meaning. like "alex tanguay resigned with the calgary flames" vs. "the ceo resigned amid controversy."

actually the more i think about it, there's also "resigning to your fate" which is accepting the way things are vs. "resigning from your job" which is NOT accepting the way things are and making a big change.

i guess it just means like quit yr job vs. quit yr bitching, so maybe not opposite

hyphen makes the difference?

Don't get "ambivalent" unless you're just counting the mistaken use of "ambivalent" to mean "indifferent".

ambivalent can be to feel v strong but conflicting feelings, or it can mean not to care one way or the other.

iirc

"take care of" -- see nurse vs. hitman

think the hitman would take that one

catholic

nice

(that was a response to Hurting 2)

xxxxxp i don't think barely works because the words after it make it opposite, ie. i barely made the bus vs. i barely missed it. you could explain pretty much any adverb as contradictory by that logic. unless i am missing something?

but y'see, it's totally ambiguous, even in the examples you gave. If someone said to me, "I barely made the bus," I'd have a hard time telling if they meant "I made the bus, but I almost didn't" or "I didn't make the bus, but I almost did" without further context. the words after it don't clarify things much at all.

the problem with "barely" is that the formal, historical definition of it is "just enough", but another informal definition is "not nearly enough" (thefreedictionary.com's entry says just this). unless you know which definition someone is using, it could go either way regardless of which verb (made vs. missed) is being modified.

I 'barely made the bus' = i made the bus, but it was close. there's no other reading i could give it.

'couldn't care less'

^ always annoys me

"couldn't care less" makes perfect sense to me, "could care less" = wtf - but ilx has done that one to death somewhere.

well yeah i was on about the opposite/same meaning on 'could care less' rly

careometer.jpg solves the dilemma

I 'barely made the bus' = i made the bus, but it was close. there's no other reading i could give it.

― "It's far from 'lol' you were reared, boy" (darraghmac), Thursday, July 29, 2010 10:32 AM (6 minutes ago)

eh, I respectfully disagree.

I mean, "I almost made the bus" means "I missed the bus, but it was close" — no question about it. but unless you already know whether or not they got on the bus, "I barely missed the bus" could describe one of two totally opposite scenarios. the technical, old-school definition of "barely" may be the only one you or I would ever use, but I know a lot of people who use it as a synonym for "not quite".

("they" being the speaker)

PIE

the only way i can justify could care less in my head is by assuming the person saying it is applying dry and acerbic sarcasm. the only way i can justify couldn't care less is by remembering that it's technically correct. effing hate both because one's nonsense and one sounds rubbish.

xxxp i don't think you're going to find anyone to support your definition of barely, that sounds completely bewildering to me.

have never heard the 'barely' where you 'didn't' whatever it was, but it's a big world

fuck, on second thought "I barely missed the bus" pretty much always means, "I missed the bus, but it was close." it's "I barely made the bus" that gives me pause. I guess the verb occasionally makes the meaning of "barely" clear, but it's a tough call more often than not.

maybe I should stop hanging around with dumb people who don't know what words mean.

well let this be a lesson to you imo

Someone told me that if our American friends table an item at a meeting, they mean that the item will be parked and not discussed, while if the Brits table something at a meeting they mean that it goes on the agenda and will be discussed. Crazy.

^ yes

something about 'continuance' in legal terms is there or thereabouts too iirc?

Greek

in one context, it means something you don't understand (It's all Greek to me!). In another, it means something you do understand (Pass it to me, I speak Greek!)

^ never heard of the latter. Must be Merkinism.

i've never heard that either

i never knew that about the british version of "table" which explains a lot of my confusion about parliament

xp I think that might be a quite specific context where someone has something which is written in Greek...

or perhaps...

mean - a mean portion could either be a small one or average sized

Strike (in the baseball sense)

Never understood that. I think they should change it to SWIPE!

ambivalent can be to feel v strong but conflicting feelings, or it can mean not to care one way or the other.

See, I don't think that second definition is actually, you know, a definition of "ambivalent". I've heard people use it that way but I always just thought it was a mistake.

The only definition in Oxford American Dictionary: having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone

I've also never heard these alternative definitions of "barely" and "Greek". "Cleave" was a good one.

xposts OK, Myonga OTM.

"protestant" too, arguably (sort of xpost)

See, I don't think that second definition is actually, you know, a definition of "ambivalent". I've heard people use it that way but I always just thought it was a mistake.

well it's probably a mistake in terms of deviation form original, but in my experience it's usually what's meant by the word.

re: people who have never heard the latter: it was kind of a (apparently hard ot understand and lame) joke. Greek wither means nonsense, or it means the Greek language which is the opposite of nonsense to Greek-literate people. Never mind.

just because I didn't laugh doesn't mean I didn't get it

how about the word cricket bat, cause in one content it's something you use in a sporting competition, but in another context it's a murder weapon

Nothing sporting about murder

It's just not cricket

ebb!

sanction

AWESOME example

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Thursday, July 29, 2010 12:55 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

completely OTM kinda dont need to read anymore after this one

overlook

dust

oversight

underwear

'peruse' as people use it / 'peruse' as it actually signifies

assume

garnish

^ good one

Maybe

(Means essentially the same as "maybe not", amiright? Kind of a half-full/half-empty sort of thing)

gets in on a technicality

Bitch - could either be a very dominant and aggressive woman, or a very submissive one.

wiki has a long list of these here. they're called auto-antonyms.

ha it backs me on ambivalent anyway IN YOUR FACE HI DERE

xp oh my god, that is exactly what I'm looking for. wikipedia is my wife

anabasis
(1) a military advance (2) a difficult and dangerous military retreat[4]

this is just due to xenophon being all contradictory with his title, right.

dollop
"Dollop" can mean "a large amount" or "a small amount" depending on its usage.

... depending on whether it's prefixed with "large " or "small" iow

fish fry
Fish fry can refer either to a meal of fried fish (or a social event primarily serving fried fish), or recently hatched fish. Thus, "fish fry" can refer to either the beginning or ending of life for a fish.

ain't wikipedia cuet

decimate
The literal meaning is to reduce by one-tenth (e.g., a decimated legion). However, in modern English it is popularly used to describe a dramatic reduction in number (a population decimated by disease).

These two meanings are not antonymic. Bad wikipedia.

that page needs decimated.

"Quite" can mean partly or completely. "This book is quite good" vs "This dinner is quite perfect".

would argue that's more on the words it's paired with again though.

quite

would think of it more as 'exactly', 'precisely' kind of thing.

I don't know, I'm happy to accept "quite" as ambiguous, at least. In modern British (and Irish? hi darraghmac) usage the meaning of "less than completely" is so dominant that it's almost always the one intended except when paired with a superlative or something more or less superlative in meaning ("quite the best", "quite perfect" etc), but since that is the newer meaning and has only become dominant over the past century or a bit longer, there's definitely still scope for ambiguity, to me

plus I am failing to think of the exact grammatical circumstances in which it means one or the other, so I don't think it's quite settled yet

am I right in thinking that to Americans it always means "completely", or is it regional? I remember it confusing a friend from Florida.

carbuncle

In modern British (and Irish? hi darraghmac) usage

blowin minds here but we didn't pick up the language from reading the OED over 300 year or anything :p

Ha, sorry, just wrote "British", and then thought that perhaps I should revise that in the light of you being the poster I was replying to. Then I was xposted by your second post on the subject and I confused myself about whether you were or weren't using it the same way. But mainly it was too close to lunchtime for me to make any sense.

Now I've had lunch and I'm still not making any sense so I'm just counting the minutes to hometime.

as a crawling apology for colonial expansion and the subsequent ills thereof, 'i was ungry guv' hardly impresses.

Cheek complaining to an Irishman about being hungry too

well i wasn't gonna go there tbh, i had quite a good lunch myself

'quite'

OK, pairing it with the same word:

"Were you happy with your meal?"
"Quite happy ... the chips were good, but the fish was cold"
"Quite happy, thank you, it was all very good"

I'd say these meanings were quite contradictory.

i wouldn't, tbh. not completely happy.

in fact the contradiction for me is saying quite happy to cold fish!

quite just means very.

oooh- 'very' is a bit of a strong reading imo

i'm with bham here - could be 'very', could be 'somewhat'

it's all in the inflection

"it was quite warm yesterday" never means somewhat warm. "she's quite intelligent" never means she's somewhat intelligent. "it was quite a fuck-up" never means it was somewhat of a fuck-up.

"she's quite intelligent" never means she's somewhat intelligent.

?!?

eh i suppose we've let worse through i'm being harsh on bham my bad etc

you'll have to excuse me the last famine we had was quite a severe one and recovery has been quite slow

it means she's very intelligent relative to a shared baseline assumption

i.e. "it was quite warm yesterday" can refer to weather that's barely above a chill, but you weren't expecting it to be that warm so in fact, relative to what you imagined it was QUITE warm

"she's _quite_ intelligent, but not really mensa material"

i.e. she's very intelligent, but not really mensa material ...

relative to a shared baseline assumption

eh that's not bad that, i like that.

but xp there's usually shades of qualification to using 'quite' too- it's middle ground stuff, you're not enthusing with 'quite'

xp i.e. she's somewhat intelligent but not really mensa material imo

she's surprisingly intelligent, not shockingly so, but i'm more interested in her friend tbh

^ all in the emhpasis

OK, I'd read the first 2 of Tracer's "never means somewhat" examples as "somewhat". "Quite a (noun)" doesn't seem to mean "somewhat", it's true. But with suitable emphasis "it was quite warm yesterday, but I was expecting it to get hotter than it did" is just as reasonable as "it was quite warm yesterday, I was surprised how warm it got" to my ears.

(tl;dr time)

OED says "As an intensifier: completely, fully, entirely; to the utmost extent or degree" and attests this usage before an adjective from c1480; usage modifying verb to signify thorough completion of action is even older. Then "as an emphasizer: actually, really, truly, positively; definitely; very much, considerably" is attested from 1624.

"As a moderating adverb: to a certain or significant extent or degree; moderately, somewhat, rather; relatively, reasonably" is attested in form "quite a(n) (adjective)" from 1808, and directly before an adjective or adverb from 1886. So, much more recent.

It notes "This sense is often difficult to distinguish from sense A. II., out of which it developed", so it's not just me and bham thinking it's ambiguous, A.II being the "as an emphasizer" section. Further, it says "rare in N. Amer. usage", which sort of answers my question upthread, and may suggest why Tracer may think it's less common?

Bham OTM

basically what you're saying is that Americans speak more clearly and correctly - I quite agree

you somewhat agree

quite = rather

= pretty

unpack

Basically what I'm saying is that Americans can make their point without several paragraphs of quotations from a dictionary strewn among bad punctuation and clumsy summarising, that's quite true

(PS I missed the bit "With many adjectives and adverbs (esp. gradable ones), quite is ambiguous between this sense and sense A. I.; in the latter sense it now tends to collocate with particular kinds of adjective and adverb (esp. non-gradable ones)", and now I think about it this "gradability" is key - "perfect" is not gradable; "true" or "agree" are arguable cases so need a more specific flag of only partial agreement; "good" is gradable, so UK-side "quite good" generally means "eh, it was OK")

UK-side "quite good" generally means "eh, it was OK"

this is madness

Think Tracer's point about prior expectations is a doozy, tho I'm not sure it doesn't actually strengthen the case for the 'nays' tbh

xp yeah 'quite good' all but begs to be finished with a sulky 'i suppose'

quite good vs rather good

You're all quite right.

(the) shit

man-flu

what does that even mean

man-flu is the flu that only men get.

if you're male then it's an extra bad case of the flu, worse than normal flu.
if you're female then it means a cold with exaggerated symptoms.

???

man-flu not a universal concept then. http://www.manflu.info/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_flu

anyway, look, up there, 'carbuncle'.

go on...

ah i guess you mean an abscess larger than a boil, usually with one or more openings draining pus onto the skin, vs. a deep-red cabochon cut gemstone usually garnet, specifically almandine.

Thought it might be the shorthand name for an intercontinental derby between Manchester United and Fluminense.

prince charles famously called some extension or other a carbuncle on the face of an old friend. meaning an ugly thing. cf gemstone, a thing generally prized for its beauty.

some extension or other

http://www.ribapix.com/image.php?i=17036&r=2&t=4&x=1

(national gallery) (london) (uk)

That'd be an Art Carbuncle then.

you're here all week i trust

I'm sorry! Speaking of which, what about 'gag'?

moot

yeah moot works i think

kick

secure

terminator

pious

"moot" is perfect

suspicious?

maybe not self-contradictory but consider:

those men look suspicious.

vs.

i'm suspicious of those men.

i was coming here to suggest that one!

along with perennial favourite 'curious'

Update!

SUBMIT

"Drift" as targeted deliberate movement, being formerly part of the verb "drive", vs "drift" i.e. meander aimlessly

(having crossed over via magic quantum superposition e.g. snowdrifts and drifting at sea where you're meandering because something else is driving you)

admittedly I'm struggling to think of a particularly convincing surviving example of the former - OED says "(do you get my) drift" = "what I am driving at", but for me that also works as a sarcastic suggestion that you are leaving it as a gentle undercurrent for the more astute listener, rather than actively shoving in that direction

I have been incoherent here and will be zung if anyone can be bothered, must be hometime

"Trailer" = something that comes before (eg a film) or after (eg a car)

suspicious?

maybe not self-contradictory but consider:

those men look suspicious.

vs.

i'm suspicious of those men.

― tangelo amour (elmo argonaut), Wednesday, 1 September 2010 15:21 (Yesterday)

I suspect 'those men look suspicious' is actually a misuse of the word that has become so common as to be accepted.

Like 'suspicious behaviour' should probably be 'behaviour arousing suspicion'.

cf. sceptical/dubious - "I am sceptical, that is dubious", not "I am dubious".

sus·pi·cious

1 : tending to arouse suspicion : questionable <suspicious characters>
2 : disposed to suspect : distrustful <suspicious of strangers>
3 : expressing or indicative of suspicion <a suspicious glance>

suspicious
"deserving of or exciting suspicion," mid-14c., from O.Fr. suspecious, from L. suspiciosus "exciting suspicion". Meaning "full of or inclined to feel suspicion" is attested from c.1400. Edgar Allan Poe (c.1845) proposed suspectful to take one of the two conflicting senses.

overlook!

Specifically:
1.
a. To look over or at from a higher place.
b. To rise above, especially so as to afford a view over: The tower overlooks the sea.

2.
a. To fail to notice or consider; miss.
b. To ignore deliberately or indulgently; disregard.

3. To look over; examine.

4. To watch over; oversee. See Synonyms at supervise.

ay, that's a good one

behaviour.

graft

dense

"he could not understand the dense text because he was too dense"

mmmm not buying that one - both mean something like "impenetrable"

the buffalo buffalo etc

screen. to show (e.g. a film) & to hide.

good one!

patronise. makes me chuckle whenever it's used in the "get cash from" sense.

literally

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym

You're talking about the common misuse of "literally" as "not literally", right? I don't think it officially has contradictory meanings?

let's ask the dictionary tsar

http://img1.etsystatic.com/008/0/8111024/il_570xN.472319187_3qwm.jpg

No-one's said my favourite one – fuse

siren

repress

was there a brief period in the 60s when "uptight" meant "cool"?

cf the stevie wonder song. why does he say "uptight" there??

adumbrate

Re: 'uptight,' a quick search unearthed this, from Tom Dalzell's Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang:

Uptight was another term meaning "very good," a very different connotation than that attached to the word in the hippie slang (inhibited) which survived at the expense of the mainstream meaning. The mainstream meaning was exemplified in the lyrics of a hit song by Little Stevie Wonder …

From context I always thought that uptight represented the life with the girl from the right side of the tracks with the butlers and maids. He has loose shabby clothes because he's poor. But he loves her and is happy about her and her uptight square world. That's just been what I've been going on.

Warhol & the Velvet Underground used "Up-Tight" in the cool sense in '66 as well (same year as the Stevie Wonder song). It is unusual how quickly and totally that word switched. Bet you don't find many positive "uptight"s after '67 even.

fuck the word "sanction". it always throws me when I read it in an article. contradictory as both a noun and a verb!

Refute:

1 : to prove wrong by argument or evidence : show to be false or erroneous
2 : to deny the truth or accuracy of - "refuted the allegations"

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, February 27, 2018 8:04 AM

#2 is new and insane to me.

contemporary!

anxious

how so

contemporary means at the same time as, so probably gives the info from context whether its contemporary to the subject or contemporary to the present time doesn't it?

Yes - in fact that is the case with every word listed here!

However, "Contemporary art" does not change its meaning depending on context as far as I'm aware

incense as a noun vs. incense as a verb

sensibility

OL i will confess that i can't puzzle out your last three contributions itt

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/anxious

makes the anxious one quite clear - worried / eager

id have to disagree with ascribing intent to the word like that tbh

to whom does one write

The two usages of 'incense' aren't directly contradictory but the noun has a pleasant connotation (generally speaking, as I know not everyone is a nag champa stan) as opposed to the negative connotation of the verb form.

OTOH I probably should've said 'sensible' (reasonable vs. given over to feeling) rather than 'sensibility'.

Brexit

ha

anxious meaning "eager" - yes but there's still anxiety in that negative sense - the eagerness is manifesting as a kind of nervous stress

incense - at root it's the same: fieriness

"bottle" in the British sense has two directly contradictory meanings. the noun means "courage" and the verb means to lose your nerve!

checks out

"but what about the Irish sense" i hear you seething

Does the verb form suggesting violence done with a bottle entail more courage or cowardice, I wonder

More contents of bottles usually

"dutch courage" originally referred to that nationality's predilection to glassing in an otherwise honourable brawl

(trivia 100% false obv)

Dutch = gin in that context i reckon

Patron - the owner or a customer of a restaurant.

Does the verb form suggesting violence done with a bottle entail more courage or cowardice, I wonder

It's rhyming slang: "bottle & glass" = class (I think), as in to have class (as a fighter); so to lose one's bottle, to bottle it.

fix

labour

"Terribly" can mean very well or very badly.

She's terribly educated vs She was terribly educated

gonna need a stewards enquiry on labour.

fix

As in "in a fix" = having problems?

yep. brought to my attention by a line in a children's book, "I'll sort your monster fix".

It's rhyming slang: "bottle & glass" = class (I think), as in to have class (as a fighter); so to lose one's bottle, to bottle it.

I thought it was "bottle and glass" = arse (it works in a Cockney accent), so losing your bottle means to shit yourself?

funky

contranym

sanction

OP otm

Missing from this list afaict:
ravel

sick

"drop" (to release to the public) vs. "drop" (to remove/discontinue)

Sony Drops ‘Uncharted’ Movie 😃..............From 2017 Release Schedule 😢
New Mutants And Mulan Dropped 😃..............From Release Schedule Due To Coronavirus 😢

sound

string

dust

nice one!

then again, if you’d change the lyrics of the Kansas hit to “all we do is dust in the wind”, it wouldn’t change the meaning of the song at all

gallant

previously meant “sexually forward” i.e. a man motivated by trying to get into ladies’ knickers and was basically negative

then became a bit of a catch-all for “courageous”, not just in carnal matters

then the honorable side of courage rubbed off on it, but the previous association with behaviour towards women remained, so magically “gallant” now means “chivalrous” - previously its exact antonym!

Same etymon as 'well' (e.g. 'well-being') and the Gallo-Roman 'walare', which meant 'to chill' (figuratively, that is). The ancestors had their priorities straight.

Along the same lines: 'to host' could also mean 'to lodge at an inn' back in the day. Its ambiguity subsists in the French 'hôte', which denotes both guest and host depending on the context. Nor is a host in the military sense a welcome guest in most cases, but it's not an exact antonym either.

Speaking of French, it also features a number of spectacular diachronic reversals: 'rem' (Latin accusative of 'res', i.e. 'thing') eventually became 'rien' (nothing).

From most to least obsolete, the nouns 'mie' (the soft part of bread), 'goutte' (drop (of liquid)), 'point' (self-explanatory) and 'pas' (step) double as adverbs that mean 'not' (e.g. 'je (ne) peux pas'). Presumably 'ne' or 'n'' on their own (as in 'on n'y voit goutte') are too puny to bear the mighty weight of negation.

fain

Definition of fain (Entry 1 of 2)
1a : WILLING
he was very fain, for the young widow was "altogether fair and lovely … "
— Amy Kelly
b : being obliged or constrained : COMPELLED
Great Britain was fain to devote its whole energy … to the business of slaying and being slain
— G. M. Trevelyan

"performative" seems to have developed a couple of almost opposite meanings, not sure which definition came first

also: communism (no state vs supreme state)

nonplussed

(contradictory usage if not actual meaning but it ain't going away.)

Karen

I was reminded of this thread by an advert for a furniture store which uses Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell's "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing" as its soundtrack. Are they able to give those massive discounts they're always telling us about because their stuff is just cheap tat?

"fellow children" because sometimes it means you are a child and sometimes is means you are in fact masquerading as a child

spare:

being in excess of present need; free for other use: spare time.

frugally restricted or meager, as a manner of living or a diet: a spare regime.

Yeah that's good!

Beheaded

am i understanding these definitions correctly? 1 and 2 are opposite, no? even the “or” in 1b seems to point the two options in opposite directions

noesis

1 : purely intellectual apprehension:
a Platonism : the highest kind of knowledge or knowledge of the eternal forms or ideas —contrasted with dianoia

b in Husserl : the subjective aspect of or the act in an intentional experience —distinguished from noema

2 : cognition especially when occurring through direct knowledge

Handicap, as it applies in golf. Perhaps not contradictory but counter-intuitive

"Dust" is my favourite in this thread. Imagine that when it was time to do the sweeping you'd say "can you dirt the floor today please"

classic Amelia Bedelia scene depending on that one iirc

Hahahah

“the goat”

Ha, yes! Took me ages to figure out this new meaning, scratched my head many times on the way

contemporary!

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, November 28, 2018 7:51 AM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Off: turn off, set off (e.g. a fire alarm)

“turn” and “set” are different words

they're not the word in question.

well then you could say anything is contradictory! the word “turn” - turn up vs turn down etc

typcially to put something in an 'off' state - turn off, switch off - is to disable it or stop it. in some cases - set off, kick off - it can mean to enable or start. ok strictly speaking it's the phrase as a whole which has the meaning, nevertheless i find it curious and amusing that 'off' can be used in this way.

i think "off" in that second group is working more as "free" or "release" or "unleash". i agree that it's doing something different to turning off a switch

let's set off the fire extinguisher! no, turn it off, turn it off!

Fuck off

Not really just seemed like the thing to say

to ask someone to fuck off is not necessarily the same as wishing them to be fucked off

fuck away

no, it's not quite the same

fuck off the pain

The phrase “if not” in constructions like “it was a piece of showmanship worthy of Gaz Coombes, if not Hitler” is used to mean two basically contradictory things (“although not Hitler” vs “and even Hitler”)

Is that a reference to the Suella Braverman resignation letter?

i don't think this is a contradiction exactly, it's more like the establishment of a continuum without locating a specific place on the continuum

viz it's contradctory to say "i was in london and also i was in glasgow" but it's not contradictory to say "i was on the london-glasgow train" -- “it was a piece of showmanship worthy of Gaz Coombes, if not Hitler” is a way of saying "i was on the coombes-hitler train": you're indicating an evolution and a direction but not a distance

in a sense are we not all on the coombes-hitler train ?

I'll be in the Quiet coach.

i agree with the wins offering of if not as used

OK how about this:

the alarm's going off
vs
the television's going off (till you've done your homework)

the yoghurts going off

Hmm. I guess that to go off might mean lots of activity (go off on a tangent) or no activity (go off line) or unexpected activity (go off script) or unpleasant activity (go off on someone).

But these are set phrases, not sure that's the same thing as a word that might function as its own antonym.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=go+off+queen

Or go off your meds, which means to not take them, or go off message, which means to lose discipline. Go off queen is more like "lose control but in a good way."

as far as I'm concerned phrases are words and I think at least some linguists would back me up on this

these days when kids say bad they mean good

Lexemes, speech acts, sure (xp)

Egregious

Also, lol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce

as far as I'm concerned phrases are words and I think at least some linguists would back me up on this

Depends on what kind of phrase you are talking about. Phrasal verbs are pretty wordlike but they still have syntactic qualities most English words do not. Idiomatic phrases are even less wordlike (there is the non-compositional model of idiom processing that you could say treats them like words but it has problems and probably isn't right). The real question is do our explicit categories of "word" and "phrase" map onto how our brain processes language? A heavily analytic language like English is very misleading here... these categories may not exist at all.

In the last few comments, people are mixing phrasal verbs with non-phrasal ones which I would say is non-contradictory. "go off" (explode, rant freely) vs "go off script" are not parsed the same way by your brain. "go off" is a phrasal verb (verb + preposition, meaning cannot be determined by normal processing... you just have to learn what it means), while "go off script" is a verb + adjectival/adverbial phrase, not a phrasal verb. Same with "the alarm is going off" (phrasal verb) vs "the TV's going off" (verb + adjectival/adverbial phrase). Phrasal verbs can have multiple meanings, which I guess you could call homonyms in some sense ("the alarm is going off" and "the yogurt is going off"). Some of these can be contradictory... that gets you closer to what I'd call a contranymal phrase (a phrasal form of a contranym like cleave).

Apparent contradiction against the backdrop of general understanding is a hint you are experiencing the concinnity of human language.

It doesn't exactly fit with the thread, but the word "lucubration" does not mean anything like it sounds.

The concinnity of the bells, bells, bells

Some excellent work itt!

Re Coombes Hitler train: contradictory may not be exactly right but the not specifying the place on the continuum can create an ambiguity in scenarios where the distance between the different potential spots is particularly meaningful — ok this might not apply so much to my own example but in other cases

Writers will often throw in a quite to remove this ambiguity: “if not quite Hitler” unlikely to be understood as “maybe even quite Hitler”

?!

seeing as you've mentioned "quite"... that means both "completely" and "partially"

No the interrobang doesn’t have contradictory meanings it has complementary meanings

(quite is mentioned at length. i did search, but forgot about the fold...)

pretty baffling revive if you ask me, and normally i like this kind of thing

Agree, budo. Nothing will ever top "cleave," and it's weird that anyone thinks we will somehow come up with startling new examples after hundreds of years of talking about this.

"Bad" meaning "good" or "sick" meaning "cool" are a different phenomenon.

Even "ass" as an all-purpose intensifier has already been discussed plenty. Big-ass, piece of ass, half-assed, it's all been unpacked before. Did we really think we were going to come up with a new example?

sad to see an ilx thread flogging a dead horse

Old ilx: takes aim at side of barn, scores direct hit

Nu ilx: well, are we SURE the horse is really dead/most sincerely dead? Maybe a bit more flogging just to be sure.

Future ilx: lame injoke #35, followed closely by injoke #56

I guess all the horses had it coming

pretty baffling revive if you ask me, and normally i like this kind of thing

― budo jeru, Thursday, 16 November 2023 14:25 bookmarkflaglink

????

eleven months pass...
contemporary!

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, November 28, 2018 7:51 AM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

― budo jeru, Tuesday, 14 November 2023 23:43 bookmarkflaglink

I appreciate the linguistic knowledge upthread- i was thinking mainly of german compound noun-phrases where what would be considered phrases in english turn up "those crazy germans have a long word for everything" type articles because the parts don't have spaces but that's just one specific type of phrase/word

@ CP, i meant the subsequent discussion. obviously my revive proper was immaculate

riffing on language, what is this web site coming to

heaven forbid we should discuss things that were long ago settled by the ancients.

“downhill” is a weird one.. when people say “it was all downhill from there” they mean it got worse and worse from that point. so if you wanted to say the opposite you’d say “it was all uphill from there” but that implies effort and discomfort. uphill is hard! downhill is easy!

it's just really annoying when the boulder starts rolling back down again

well the word downhill hasnt changed meaning and i do think this is a case where the phrase is going to be highly contextualised

i enforce all downhill from here as a positive statement at work and i threaten sanctions if anyone objects

“downhill” is a weird one.. when people say “it was all downhill from there” they mean it got worse and worse from that point. so if you wanted to say the opposite you’d say “it was all uphill from there” but that implies effort and discomfort. uphill is hard! downhill is easy!

i think about this every time and i think a lot of other people must, too. it's amazing the phrase has lasted so long. whoever started it must have lived somewhere with a very steep, dangerous hill

Meanwhile Midwestern Americans are like, "What's a hill?"

Same with Floridians.

My friend got an 18 speed bike growing up and all his friends said "the fuck you need that for?"

I'd parse "it's all downhill from here" when used as a negative statement as meaning "the endeavor/business/artist has achieved their peak ability/quality/performance and aren't going to do better"... it's not a measure of effort, but quality

Downhill is worse on your knees

But better overall when it comes to rolling shit somewhere

it's like "i'm feeling a bit below par", well that's good right? i mean in golf and all...

in golf yes in many other usages its rather a target to attain tbf

downhill as a positive description has had a renaissance in team sports esp American football when players are described as "downhill runners" like they run with momentum and speed as if they are going downhill

From ILM:
Vince Guaraldi - A Charlie Brown Christmas: You cannot fuck with this album

The sentiment would be the same if it were:
Vince Guaraldi - A Charlie Brown Christmas: You MUST fuck with this album

^ good one

"favours" eg If someone favours a certain pen they own, that would mean they use it a lot. But if an athlete seems to be favouring her left leg it means she's using it as little as she can

I thought favouring a limb meant using it more because the other one is injured?

It does... doesn't it?

haha maybe i have always used this wrong

historically it has meant what tracer says: that e.g. you protect ("favour") the injured leg by using it less -- favour as in you're being kind to it

however the apparent contradiction tracer highlights means that modern usage has become pretty confused = you protect the injured leg by using ("favouring") the other one more -- favour as in you prefer to put weight on it

yeah i don’t have any memory of it being used that way but no doubt today’s simpletons LIKE TOM D AND NV have once again ruined language for everyone

every good leg deserves favour

time wounds all heels as the great man once said

words mean exactly what I intend them to mean

that's just mean

it's the mean but it's not necessarily just

resisting the urge to soapbox on "performative" again because social media has made it way too hard to use the word in a meaningful way without having to redefine it first

like I *wish* gender was just shallow surface posturing in the same vein as a brand's newfound wokeness. maybe it is that kind of thing just done really hard for thousands of years

I didn't resist that hard

drawing the curtains = opening or closing them. Dickens uses "undraw" for open, but I'm guessing that's obsolete everywhere, right?

“fast” is a great one

the lex otm, tuomas offtm

milk carton otms

apparently

Probably been done upthread but (US) could care less = (UK) couldn't care less

"Could care less" is in colloquial use, but it's still "wrong."

i could have sworn i already posted this. maybe i did it in the wrong thread fml. French has a couple of these, sorta

“pas terrible” - literally “not terrible” but actually means irredeemably bad

“fais gaffe” - literally “make a mistake” but actually means watch out, be careful, mind your step

i think the meaning of "pas terrible" is closer to "Well, it wasn't terrible, but it wasn't exactly great either"

as for "fais gaffe", perhaps it has something to do with the literal definition of "gaffe", since you are generally in an attentive state of mind when docking a boat with a boathook?

well the way my family uses it, it means “VERY terrible” - it’s tremendously counterintuitive which is why i included it here

ah this page explains it. “terrible” in the archaic sense of “terrific”. so “not great”

https://www.thoughtco.com/ce-nest-pas-terrible-1371144

so it serves for english too! i had to double check the full thread and i’m actually mildly surprised no one’s suggested it yet. “terrible” = 1) quite bad 2) terrific

I've definitely heard 'terrible' used to mean 'fantastic' in French. An uncle of mine (who is admittedly in his 80s) uses it that way.

yeah i feel like i've heard "terriblement" too like eg darling, would you mind terribly if i stayed the night with joan? i'd be ever so grateful for it

Captain Terrible and the Brown Dirt Cowboy

good one, Tracer

not quite opposites but:
https://i.redd.it/e8cjmmi3cwl21.jpg

applause

Garbage man vs. garbage person

xp amazing!

the "terribly" thing has echoes in English I think, eg "She's terribly educated" vs "She was terribly educated"..?

yes i think thats right

teddibly

“peak”

i need you to explain that one

Peak means bad in British slang (I had to look that up)

no wonder coppers knew the Peaky Blinders were bad guys

I was wondering the other day if there was any opposite slang (is there a grammatical term for this? bad = good etc) where a positive means a negative instead of the other way round.

"Peak", to become weak, thin, and sickly, first recorded 1500, origin uncertain. Usually used as an adjective these days, "you're looking a bit peaky". Wonder if thats where the slang came from or not.

the grammatical term is pejoration

at least in the direction of positive > negative

i just learned a good example yesterday: "clambake" used to mean a hip shindig, and Tommy Dorsey even had a jazz combo called the "Clambake Seven" -- but by the '50s "clambake" came to mean a difficult or unproductive jam session, and the word "clam" persists today among musicians as a term for a wrong note or blunder

Peak means bad in British slang (I had to look that up)

Never heard of it.

In any case, slang words that mean the opposite of their standard meaning, no shortage of those.

well with the slang word peak I think it actually evolved from meaning "intensely amazing" - like a peak experience - and then pivoted to meaning "intensely bad" - like in both cases it means "super intense" but just slipped from good to bad

In any case, slang words that mean the opposite of their standard meaning, no shortage of those.

― Not waving but droning (Tom D.), Tuesday, April 23, 2024 10:24 AM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

obviously. but it would be more fun if you listed your favorite examples

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw1ZhGBDICI

It seems very rare now but "stupid" used to mean amazing in the '90s, I guess it evolved from "stupid fresh"

> Tommy Dorsey even had a jazz combo called the "Clambake Seven"

i think you're missing a more obvious clambake, the elvis waterskiing film

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clambake_(film)

(oh, i put it in url tags to avoid the famous ends-in-a-) bug and it did the exact same thing anyway)

Click-me-do

"peak" in contemp UK slang is closer to bad luck or tough shit, I think: That's peak (for you). certainly the way my kids use it. makes me think of pique.

So “peak” is the equivalent of how very old Americans say “Doesn’t that beat all!”

xpost yeah mine too. but i think it started out as something more intense like whoa fuck, worst moment ever

Cacaphemism is reverse euphemism m, like referring to your spouse as the ol' ball and chain or your car as a jalopy

Sports writers will often talk about a player who, on the cusp of a big career decision, resigns, which means they've inked a new contract with their existing club

Yeah, that one's tripped me up a few times...

that took me a while

It's not the word 'resign', so not a contradictory meaning. It's 'sign' with the prefix 're' added. That's why it should be hyphenated, to avoid the ambiguity.

I debated that for awhile before including on this thread but the two different words are both spelled the same way so it is the same "word" in that respect

apparently that's called a piecewise doublet. i think it's close enough for the thread, or at least i found it interesting

the two different words are both spelled the same way so it is the same "word" in that respect

Yes, that's true, but only when you omit the hyphen. I like hyphens. Unfortunately, some people think we should dispense with hyphens as much as possible. They say hyphens make text look 'fussy' or 'messy', but they serve various purposes. But where there's no ambiguity, I'm fine with omitting them, just not in cases like this.

I like hyphens too and wish the "X-, Y- and Z-free" format didn't seem to be dying out. I'd welcome "Free from X, Y and Z". But you get e.g. "This jewellery is nickel and tin free".

Execute

temper

qualify? as in, it could mean to meet or exceed a standard, but if you offer a qualified opinion you're suggesting it may not actually meet a certain standard of correctness, if i'm understanding this properly.

diegesis/diegetic? as opposed to mimesis, the act of showing, diegesis refers to the act of telling. diegesis also refers to the world of the story being told, in which the narration, or diegesis, is extradiegetic, or not part of that world.

Might be discussed upthread somewhere but I was reminded about “downhill” recently

In IT settings, I've seen "transparent" used to mean "invisible": the process is transparent to the user = the user doesn't notice it.

Which runs counter to the normal business meaning of "transparent" (that is, providing full disclosure; forthright).

Transparent meaning easily seen through covers both those scenarios?

YMP, i can definitely see what you're saying

Narco = drug trafficker or police agent fighting drug traffickers

XP bad news, Touch and Go reissued La Maison de Mon Reve for it's 20th anniversary tomorrow! i was shocked to find that thing repressed in a random record store in Europe.

― Western® with Bacon Flavor, Thursday, October 24, 2024 12:32 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

"spike" can mean to suppress (as a news story) or to undergo a sudden sharp increase (as a temperature)

ha repressed is a good one

words with contradictory meanings

tumbleweeds 8(

lol

'x was lost to y' in the context of military victories/defeats. I just finished reading John Keegan's The First World War, and I kept noticing sentences like this.

Much of the Red Line was lost to the British during the afternoon, either because the garrison ran away or was overwhelmed by the power of the attack.

i.e. the British lost much of the Red Line.

surely that means the British gained much of the Red Line?!

Not in this instance!

what?

eg “she’s lost to me now”

He went to California
Hearing that everything's warmer there
So you write him a letter and say "Her eyes are blue"
He sends you a poem and she's lost to you

Compare "you're dead to me."

Here’s another example from the book:

[French General] Joffre’s object, not yet fully formulated, was to deploy across the rear of the Germans’ thickening front on the Chemin des Dames and so to regain possession of the northern departments, rich in agriculture and industry, lost to France during August.

I think it’s a bit more intuitive in the first person. “The northern departments were lost to us during August.”

Why not say 'Lost BY the British'?

i feel like that's just bad writing/editing but

It's idiomatic for Keegan. In the same way, he wouldn't think twice about saying "shedule" or "take a decision." Or the way someone might say that their hair "needs washed" vs "needs to be washed."

i feel like in order to write like that youd almost have to have a perspective of not just default thinking that the reader is british and reading from that perspective but that you havent imagined that they could be anything else

and even then its forced

"i need a poo"

could mean you're looking to gain a poo but equally could mean you've got one you'd like to get rid of

- Sir John Keegan, OBE

- David Foster Wallace

Tapped

“The keg is tapped” can mean both that a tap has been inserted and it is ready to dispense drinks, and that it’s now completely empty and no longer able to dispense drinks

by the way I always learned that these were called “Janus words”, after Roman god Janus,who looks in opposite directions at the same time, as seen in Janus Films’ logo

...and today's date...

Cool

"Paul Weller was cool towards us"

1) "he came over had a chat and a laff before going back to his dressing room"

2) "he completely ignored us and anything we asked him..."

maybe it comes down to a difference between the UK and the US, but nobody in America would ever want to talk to Paul Weller

I was just thinking of the phrase "kick out the jams." These days you might hear something like, "that band can kick out the jams," meaning they can produce jams and that's a good thing. Whereas the MC5 originally used "kick out the jams" as a command to mean stop jamming.

I thought it was about sandwich ingredients

After over 125 years in business, Smuckers can still kick out the jams

Kick out the jams, Mother Smuckers!

maybe it's actually 'kick out the jambs' aka the door frame

(My band, showing up at the festival with the wrong outfits: "I thought you said wanted a yam band.")

"drop" (to release to the public) vs. "drop" (to remove/discontinue)

Just saw the headline "Norway Dropped as White Lotus Season 4 Location" and was completely baffled which meaning they meant (it was the latter)

to reduce

i'm having a hard time understanding what you mean

it can mean to diminish in the main sense but in cooking its a method of concentrating and strengthening

listen i don't mean to police the thread but that's pushing it

no imo

im quite happy to police the thread and that's far better than most submissions so there

ingratiating, kinda - sometimes people mean that a person endeared themselves to the room, and sometimes they mean a person tried and failed to endear themselves to the room

I think the word just means something like aiming to gain favour or approval from others in a sycophantic manner. That aim can meet with success or failure - but the meaning of the word doesn’t change ?

yes you're right it's really the verb "to ingratiate" that i'm opposing to the adjective "ingratiating" .. the latter is basically always negative isn't it? like someone is doing it in an annoying way. but you could say "he's ingratiating himself (in?)to the room" - same word, different part of speech - and it wouldn't necessarily have that connotation of being an obvious suck-up, in fact it might mean the opposite

Please patronize my business!

Stop patronizing me!

GARNISH, am I right

you are right and so was elmo argonaut 15 years ago but kudos it really is a canonical example of this sort of thing

I'm not right and the Connections on Aug 2 was bad No way that's purple: the NYT Connections thread
Grr @ elmo for making the Connections seem reasonable

Turgid, when applied to eg (a) a ballad, or (b) a river.

c) penis

advent

in the christian calendar it’s the time of waiting, BEFORE the big day

in secular usage it means the big thing has happened and we are now living in that new reality eg “the advent of steam power”

Please patronize my business!

Stop patronizing me!

A patron can be the owner of a business (esp. a restaurant) or a customer of it.

Hmm. Both "boss" and "benefactor." I guess a restaurant is saying the customer is king?

The negative sense in "don't patronize me" is sort of "don't pretend you're being magnanimous," almost "I don't need your generosity."

Peeled

Unpeeled

I never know whether "pitted" olives have pits or don't.

There are tons of those, pitted skinned boned

"Shell" as well.

boned vs deboned

idg this?
a peeled banana has been peeled. an unpeeled one hasn't.

We have a machine at work with 2 different calibrations for spelt wheat: DEHULLED and UNHULLED. They mean opposite things

xp i think the idea is you could plausibly say, "She unpeeled the banana." and most people would understand this to mean the banana had its peel removed.

Yeah it's adjective vs verb usage i think