I didn’t really mean it as a personal insult… likewise the dictionary could be made probably 99% thinner if we eliminated every word that I couldn’t imagine a need for. But I seriously have to challenge the notion that one’s personal lack of imagination defines what words everyone else needs to use. That’s just silly.
I already explained that unrelated doesn’t mean ‘not synonymous’. The concept of relationship is orthogonal to that of meaning. As in your example of ‘elephant’ and ‘chair’, the words are related in ways that their meanings are not.
I challenge you to come up with *one word *in the dictionary, then, that I would find equally useless to the one you’re searching for. (I realize that “the” dictionary isn’t entirely accurate–I’d say feel free to go with anything published and resonably authoritative.)
Generally speaking, if a language *has *a need for a word, it will exist already. New words are created to serve *new *needs. The discussion of language is not a new one; I highly doubt you’re the first person to have noticed that some (many (most)) words are unrelated in meaning. If all the linguists before you had no need of the term, then it seems a little… hubristic to assume you need one.
Non-synonymous or nonsynonymous is the word you’re looking for.
Here’s the wiktionary entry. It’s used as a term in linguistics, but also in genetics, from what I can tell Googling. edit: It’s a perfect usable word and useful concept. For example, here’s it in use from Google Books: “The communicative purpose of medical language is first and foremost to provide a nonambiguous and preferably nonsynonymous language by means of terminologies in order to express relevant concepts”
I’ve been enjoying the dialog between Cosmic Relief and Shot From Guns and have some degree of sympathy with both points of view.
It reminds me in a way of how my three kids, as a group, came up with some interesting things along the lines of
“Fixed is the absence of broke”
which were in response to my telling them that
“Death is the absence of life” and other assorted concepts of that type.
Circular definitions can be a real treat when it takes more than just a few to complete the circle.
But I’ll suggest that the root of the disagreement here is that the idea of “opposite” needs further distinction. If the item must be “antipodal” then it removes all the things along the spctrum between the extremes. But if “just different” is all that’s required, the Universe is open.
I’d disagree pretty strongly with that one. “Fixed” has a very strong implication–pretty much baked-in to the definition–that the item in question had been broken at one time and then returned to a state of functionality. So I can have something that isn’t broken but is also not fixed.
I interpret ‘opposite’ being just a negation. The negation of ‘synonymous’ is ‘nonsynonymous’. The negation of ‘heat’ is ‘cold’, ‘dark’ => light, etc. A pair like ‘synonym’ <=> ‘antonym’ is to me an inverse, and inverses are not opposites.
Just my opinion… the negation of hot is “not hot.” The opposite of hot is “cold.”
The negation of “heat” is “do not heat.” The opposite of “heat” is “chill.”
I say this from the point of view of someone who has to serve food to children that is neither hot nor cold, which sometimes requires that I heat, actively chill, or passively chill that food.
Another way of looking at the underlying issue is in the realm of Formal Logic. Before the advent of Fuzzy Logic where some partial value of Yes-ness and No-ness can be appled, if something isn’t True, then it is False, which gets very unsettling in discussions where “I don’t know” or “Maybe” or “To Be Determined” are equally valid responses.
The notion of a spectrum of values between what may be considered Opposites on that scale leaves much more open the idea of synonyms. And the broader the willingness to accept similarity in such an arena means a profusion of synonyms. Surely you’ve encountered synonymies where there are dozens of synonyms. If not, check out “steal” or “drunk” or even “dead” in a thesaurus.
Upthread the relationship between “chair” and “elephant” was mentioned. It’s quite possible that definitions of those two concepts might include “four legged” so they have at least that feature in common. But whether that small similarity permits the use of the term “synonym” depends on how loose the synonym requirement is. So even while you can say they don’t mean the same thing you’d need to be careful to isolate that way of looking at the world to say how use of your new word could say something meaningful about how “chair” and “elephant” are unrelated.
If the negation of synonymous is nonsynonymous rather than antonymous (if there is such a word), why is:
The negation of heat cold instead of tepid?
The negation of dark light instead of twilight?
Something can be not hot without being cold, not dark without being light, and not a synonym without being an antonym. But those things are not *antonyms *of their various x’s.
I’d like to pretend that I haven’t read the posts in this thread to see if I can address the OP directly.
My best guess is “No, there isn’t a specific term for that.” I think the example of “kelp” and “succinct” and how their relationship can be expressed in a single term is a red herring of sorts. Those two words differ in an astounding number of ways. In fact, it’s hard to imagine non-trivial ways that they do share some meaningful relationship.
So to imagine a term that would express the idea that “not only do these words not mean the same thing, they don’t even relate to each other in any meaningful way” would be a way of glorifying the absence of a relationship that they might share. It would be like listing every possible word that bears no resemblance to the word “baseball” (in any way whatsoever) and then coming up with a word that uniquely describes what all those words have in common.
To whatever degree these ideas repeat or amplify what others have said in this thread, I will acknowledge that I have read the thread. I just tried to come at the issue in a fresh way.
I believe I got carried away with the idea of “opposites” before. “Opposites” are a side issue, I suggest.
