Huh. Well that explains a lot.
Diverging from the topic; but – whether “re-sign” is reckoned admissible or not – I wish someone had told the bolded, to a one-time work colleague of mine. This woman visited various atrocities upon the English language; one such being that there was absolutely no word in it, for which she was not ready to coin a “re-” form, denoting something done repeatedly or afresh. She would talk about “re-giving”, “re-buying”, and, on one occasion, about an evil ideology “re-rearing its ugly head”. She was basically a sweet lady; but her perpetual “re-” stuff sometimes made me want to wring her neck.
“Sanction”
As a noun, it means something done to punish or hinder. “We’re enforcing sanctions on Iran.”
As a verb, it means to condone or approve. “This action was sanctioned by the front office.”
ravel (to disentangle)
ravel (to entangle)
I see no objection to using “re-sign” meaning to sign again, but I’d certainly spell it with the hyphen.
The pronunciations are different too. “re-sign” would have a hard “s” (like in sing, sum, or south), while “resign” (meaning “quit”) has a soft “s” (pronounced like “z”).
“Literally” has been used figuratively, as an intensifier, for a long time, and no doubt people have been getting het up about it, and making the joke that it is used to mean figuratively, its opposite, but they are not just talking nonsense because they are fighting the inevitabilities of usage. The “joke” itself is a nonsense. “Literally” is never used to mean figuratively. I defy anyone to come up with a real example where the word “literally” is used, and where “figuratively” could be substituted for it without a significant change in the meaning. In the examples given in the passage you quote, substituting “figuratively” would considerably weaken the force of the figurative expressions that follow, whereas the use of “literally” strengthens their force, as the authors intended. In other cases, substituting “figuratively” would make no sense at all. If I say a blue whale is “literally enormous”, I do not in any sense mean that it is “figuratively enormous”. It really is enormous, and I want to hammer the point home.
It may be true that “literally” as an intensifier is most commonly used before figurative expressions, and it may well be that its use as an intensifier originated in this context, as a way of seeming to deny their figurativeness, and so make their impact stronger, but I think its use as an intensifier is now sufficiently well established that it can be, and is, sensibly be used before non figurative expressions too.
The logical choice would be to change the spelling of the one meaning “to end a job” to something like “rezine”.
Once I was able to recover the couch from the dump, I needed to recover it. I may never recover.
The Huffington Post just put up a new article on contranyms, with plenty of examples.
Skin, meaning to cover as well as remove the covering, seems wrong to me, but it’s right there in the dictionary. Can’t remember ever seeing it used, though.
You’ve never heard of “skinning a deer”?
Dammit! I was gonna post that. Hi, Doctor Nick!
If you are a Firefox user, go here to skin your browser.
For a fun romp in language weirdness, check out the medieval “Again-Bite of In-Wit”. Seems the author didn’t like Latin very much and decided to calque all the fancy Latin words into native Anglo-Saxon constructions. The meaning of the title was supposed to be “Remorse of Conscience”, but I guess he got bitten again by inner wisdom and realized that he was really writing about the “Re-Morse of Con-Science” and went from there.
Sure you can. English is flexible that way; the whole point of prefixes like “re-”, “un-”, “pre-” and so forth is to produce new words in a way that fluent users immediately understand. A bit too flexible, in fact; the difference between resign as in “write your John Hancock again” (pronouncd /ˈri.sain/) and resign as in “take this job and shove it, asshole” (pronounced /rɪ.ˈzaɪn/) would be clearer if the hyphen were mandatory, but the tendency in English is to elide them over time.
I blame the – wait, who am I prejudiced against this week? I blame the Newfoundlanders.
Yesterday I bozoed. Today I rebozoed.
I never skinned a deer, but I skinned my knee plenty of times.
Skinning a deer means taking the skin off. I was questioning the use of the word to mean putting a skin on.
Doe? A deer? A female deer?
Yesterday I transgressed the rules against pwning noobs. Today, I plan to retransgress. Many of my friends are behind me and share my proretransgressive attitude. Several of the guys, though, have started an antiproretransgression movement to prevent what they feel is unnecessary repetition of such behavior. Most people don’t have a strong opinion about that movement, but a few have become inordinately obsessed and become superantiproretransgressionists. Before we can tackle them heads-on, we need to understand their ideas and how different members agree and disagree by doing a few intersuperantiproretransgressionism studies, which will be combined into one metaintersuperantiproretransgressionism study with a planned postmetaintersuperantiproretransgressionism study to be done after six months.
And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in, engaging in acts of antiproretransgressionmentarianism, and walking out. And friends they may thinks it’s a movement. And that’s what it is, the Alice’s Restaurant Antiproretransgressionmentarian Movement.
That movement would be called antiproretransgressionmentarianism, the obsessional wing of which would be superantiproretransgressionmentarianism.