That list is horrible. I’m relieved that they didn’t include “peruse.”
A former colleague of mine told me about an incident at a company he used to work for. I can’t speak for the veracity of the story.
Boss to middle manager : “I want this issue to be tabled”
UK usage of table: placed on the agenda for a meeting.
US usage of table: kept under the table, not talked about.
A lot of these entries seem very forced, or just bad English.
cite = single out for praise (“cited for bravery”), single out for blame (“citation from the Buildings Dept.”)
Uh, doesn’t cite in this sense just mean “to single out”?
infer = to take a hint, to hint
Ugh.
secrete = to extrude, to hide
These are opposite meanings?
Wha? Speaking as a life-long US resident, I would not have been confused by the boss’s statement in the slightest. The so-called “US usage” isn’t really. “Under the table” would give you that definition, but not “table” by itself.
Not under the table as if hiding, but rather set aside on the table to be dealt with later.
CWG has corrected my understanding of the US usage of the word. The boss instructed that the matter be “set aside” but the underling brought it up in the next staff meeting.
One word was mistaken for an autoantonym, so official language had to recast it: inflammable meant ‘easily bursts into flame’, and is clearly related to the verb enflame.
But the Latin prefixe in- can have several different meanings: the intensive prefix of inflammable meaning ‘into’ was mistaken for the more familiar negative prefix in-. The concern was that people would think inflammable meant ‘does not to burst into flame’, resulting in fire safety hazards. Then fire safety codes replaced it with the (new?) word flammable as an unambigous warning.
Flammable is a made-up English word because in Latin there is no verb *flammare; there’s only the verb inflammare ‘to set on fire’.
So in this case, hawthorne, simply the appearance of an autoantonym was cause for real concern. That was a good point you made about how unconscious people’s use of language can be… until one begins to examine closely what one is really saying… if Lovecraft had written philological horror fiction as Tolkien wrote philological fantasy, there would have been a book locked away in a cobwebbed cabinet of the Miskatonic University library, darkly whispered about for revealing the hidden contradictions all human language is riddled with, study of which had driven all linguists who read it stark raving mad… :eek:
From the web page linked in the OP, the explanation of the verb dust is really cool.
I had thought this thread had slipped away without ever quite getting on topic, so thanks for your post Johanna.
I liked the explanation surrounding dust, too; and I hadn’t heard of the story about flammable. It makes sense.
I also like the irony that underlies people’s understandable but mistaken and futile objection to literally meaning figuratively set out in this Slate piece (that IIRC was linked to here at the time):[
According to Paul Fussell, “flammable” came about as an intentional response to the fact that too many people incorrectly thought that the first syllable of inflammable was a negation.
I’m not bothered by autoantonyms when I understand where they come from. British nobles are called “peers” because according to common law they have the right to judged by their “peers”…i.e. other nobles. So in that context it means “equals” too.
Cleave (split) and cleave (stick together) are now the same but used to be different. Even today, one is regular and one is irregular. For me, that makes them different words.
“Sanction” does bother me.
How can you say that? Break down the following sample:
The sonata comprises several movements.
vs.
The sonata is comprised of several movements.
The first sentence is in active voice and the second is in the passive, without the subject and object being transposed. For any other verb, these two statements would be practically opposite in meaning. I tend to be suspicious of the “comprised of” construction, because I suspect it of being the result of attempted aggrandizement by adding syllables, and also of resulting from confusion between “compose” and “comprise”.
Good point! We got us a structuralist here.
That’s one of the interesting ones. I think the basic concept is to forbidding you to touch.
Arabic has a similar semantic split around the root h-r-m. The Sacred Mosque of Mecca is named al-Masjid al-Harâm. The word haram means ‘sanctuary’ and refers to the three most sacred mosques in Islam, in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. But the word harâm also means ‘forbidden’ as well as sacred. So nude women, extramarital sex, gay sex, booze, pork, Christmas, atheism, Zionism, satirical cartoons about Prophets—everything that horrifies and disgusts Muslims the most—is also called “harâm.” The identical word as the most sacred things in the religion, like the Ka‘bah of Mecca to which they turn in prayer 5 times a day.
Drastic a dichotomy as this sounds, it isn’t hard to explain. The old Arabian sanctuaries like the Ka‘bah, which were of the baetyl type common throughout the pagan Middle East, had rules from time immemorial that killing, violence, hunting were forbidden to pilgrims worshiping there. Not even a leaf of a plant is to be destroyed. The Prophet explained the root concept of harâm in a hadith: If your herd grazes near the boundary of a sanctuary (haram*), if they get too close to it they’ll stray over the edge and violate its sanctity, so keep well away from the edge. The sacredness of these places was ritualized by restricting behavior that was normally permissible—especially fighting, since tribal warfare was endemic in the Arabian Peninsula, the pagan religion there required places of sanctuary where a person could feel safe from attack. This custom was retained in Islam.
Chronos and Spectre, your remarks on “comprise” are particularly accurate in fighting ignorance.
Nice try, but I don’t quite buy it. The verbs are only opposite by very loose description, and the nouns are actually the same: a pay scale is a sequence of pay rates (varying according to some criteria, such as seniority on the job or type of work performed).
In general, it seems most of these are like ‘dust’ and just reflect that there are things you can either put on or take off (e.g. ‘seed’). I do wonder about the evolution of some of them, ‘bolt’ and ‘fast’ for instance.
I think the verb bolt ‘to move suddenly’ means to move like a crossbow bolt. The original meaning of bolt was a rod used for fastening. Then the crossbow was invented and its projectile got the same name because it shot a rod.
Fast is the really weird one. Its original meanings all had to do with sticking firmly in place, which includes the verb to fast, meaning to stick firmly to the non-eating program. How did it get to mean moving quickly?
Fast was an adverb centuries before it became an adjective as we now usually think of it. The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology says
So no wonder it’s a puzzle now–it originated in a riddle!
“Garnish” can mean to add to or to subtract from.
When the chef garnishes my steak, that usually doesn’t mean he cuts 20% of it off and eats it himself.
Conversely, when the creditors garnish my paycheck, that probably doesn’t mean it comes with a sprig of parsley attractively placed in the center. 
Bonedadj
1: having had the bones removed; “a boneless rib roast”; “a boned (or deboned) fish” [syn: deboned]
2: having bones as specified; “his lanky long-boned body”
That one always confuses me. Its often unclear whether the word mean on the bone or filleted.
Which would, of course, be feigned to have been the *Necroverbicon * of the Mad Arab Al-Adad! 
ROFL, Poly, that’s one of the funniest posts ever! Good thing I was drinking water!
[Darkseid voice]
That’s because “flammable” was coined by illiterates. Fear not; once I am God-King of Earth, I shall track down the person or persons responsible for its spread and make them feel my wrath.
[/darkseid voice]
It’s suggested above that it was coined for illiterates.
But it sounds like tossers were involved. I mean, why were they trying to write inflammable as a warning? Presumably because fire hazard didn’t sound sufficiently superior.
No reason it can’t be both! 