Month: July 2019

I was delighted to find that today’s Word of the Day – “churlish” – contains within its etymology a bit of insight into my own character.  I’ll leave it to better students of human development than me to figure out exactly what that means here and now.  But as to the history, Merriam-Webster explains:

It is easy to understand how churlish has come to mean “vulgar,” “surly,” and “intractable” — if you know your English history.  In Anglo-Saxon England, a churl, or ceorl, was a freeman of the lowest rank who owned and cultivated a small farm. He had certain rights and had upward mobility to rise to the rank of thane.  After the Norman Conquest, however, many churls became serfs.  This change in status meant losing not just social mobility but geographical mobility as well. The lowest rungs of a social system often serve as inspiration for a language’s pejoratives.  And churl eventually came to be used as a term for any rude, ill-bred person.

 

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Hey folks, nobody ever said this was gonna be all pretty puff pieces.

You been warned.

Disclaimer:  No warthogs were harmed in the production of this post.  Also, they don’t even have warts. As to whether they’re churlish, you be the judge.

If you were an astronomy-obsessed adolescent like I once was, you probably know that today’s Word of the Day – “planet” – means “wanderer” in Greek. To the ancients, stars were fixed points of light in the night time sky, while those lights that moved around over time were something else. In pre-Copernican days there was no notion of a “solar system,”  but the difference between “fixed” and “wandering” was readily apparent to anyone with a keen eye and enough of a scientific bent to take note and remember from night to night.

The other reason I choose to take note of this particular Word of the Day is the sample sentence that comes with it in Merriam-Webster’s daily email:

“Dell is the father of Steph Curry, and Steph (in case you’ve been living on another planet) plays for the Golden State Warriors, the team that Drake’s beloved Raptors have to beat if they’re going to bring an NBA Championship home.”

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OK, enough with the light stuff. The linguists were getting antsy, threatening to riot.  So that must mean it’s time to bring out the heavy guns.  Everyone has heard of synonyms (two words that mean the same thing) and antonyms (opposites). But have you ever heard of contronyms? I hadn’t.  Not until today.

The full article’s here.  Excerpts are below.  Read on if you dare, or care.

Here’s an ambiguous sentence for you: “Because of the agency’s oversight, the corporation’s behavior was sanctioned.” Does that mean, “Because the agency oversaw the company’s behavior, they imposed a penalty for some transgression”?  Or does it mean, “Because the agency was inattentive, they overlooked the misbehavior and gave it their approval by default”? We’ve stumbled into the looking-glass world of contronyms — words that are their own antonyms.

 

1. Sanction (via French, from Latin sanctio(n-), from sancire ‘ratify,’) can mean “give official permission or approval for (an action)” or conversely, “impose a penalty on.”

2. Oversight is the noun form of two verbs with contrary meanings, “oversee” and “overlook.” Oversee, from Old English ofersēon (“look at from above”) means “supervise” (medieval Latin for the same thing: super-, “over” plus videre, “to see.”) Overlook usually means the opposite: “to fail to see or observe; to pass over without noticing; to disregard, ignore.”

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The full post includes 23 more contronyms, including “left,” “dust,” “seed,” “trim,” and – my personal favorite – “flog.” It originally appeared on Mental Floss and was published June 15, 2018.

The contronym (also spelled “contranym”) goes by many names, including auto-antonym, antagonym, enantiodrome, self-antonym, antilogy and Janus word, from the Roman god of beginnings and endings, often depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions. Can’t get enough of them? The folks at Daily Writing Tips have rounded up even more.

…or something.