I had this idea for a thread quite some time ago. But it’s been so long, I don’t even remember if I posted. In any event, it was long ago in any event, as I said.
Words that seemingly should mean the exact opposite, but don’t…
Canny and Uncanny mean the same thing, I once read. So does Flammable and Inflammable.
Oh, and I just thought of one now. Could and Couldn’t mean the exact same thing, in the sentence I could/couldn’t care less. Does that last one count?
Not sure if this counts, but “peruse” technically means to read very closely and carefully, yet it has been misused to mean “skim” or “flip through” to the point that has become the dominant meaning. A similar thing happened with “edgy,” which went from meaning “nervous” to something closer to “bold.”
Valuable and invaluable. At least, as used by people who don’t understand what invaluable means. I hear certain items in video games that you buy from vendors in-game as being invaluable for a certain task, and I guess they are right in one sense, but the fact that the item has an in-game value that the vendors will accept make it seem to not apply. Sure, no amount of real-world money could replace that item, but that’s true for practically anything in a video game (except pay-to-win micro transaction games, which I wouldn’t even consider games).
This is not about auto-antonyms, words that have two senses which are opposite to each other, but two words where one appears to mean the opposite of the other, but they actually mean basically the same thing.
That’s an interesting one. Originally we had Inflammable and non-Inflammable but that proved to be confusing because In English, we think of in- as a prefix that means “not”: inactive means “not active.” Therefore, inflammable should mean “not flammable.”
In 1959 the British Standards Institution issued the following advice: “In order to avoid any possible ambiguity, it is the Institution’s policy to encourage the use of the terms ‘flammable’ and ‘non-flammable’ rather than ‘inflammable’ and ‘non-inflammable.”
Without watching the video, I’ll just say that couldn’t care less is meant as sarcasm, and sarcasm reverses the meaning of a phrase. I couldn’t care less is idiomatic slang and not, not, not an error.
We’ve done both topics many times before, if anybody cares to search.
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