Which led to a very acrimonious meeting during World War II, with the British saying that a particular issue was so important that it needed to be tabled immediately, while the Americans thought it was so important that it could not be tabled at all.
Someone needed to stand up and shout “No motion is too trivial to table!”
Further reading: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24582
It never adds “figuratively” to the meaning of a phrase. I can’t think of a case where if you heard a phrase you would take it literally but if you added “literally” to it you would then take it figuratively. What it means in common usage is more like a generic intensifier of a figurative phrase, which is different from altering the meaning of a phrase toward more figurativeness.
Douglas Hofstadter talked about that phrasing in one of his books, as I recall.
Citation on the WWII event https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/books/chapter-origins-of-the-specious.html
“The enjoyment of a common language was of course a supreme advantage in all British and American discussions,” Churchill wrote in The Second World War. No interpreters were needed, for one thing, but there were “differences of expression, which in the early days led to an amusing incident.” The British wanted to raise an urgent matter, he said, and told the Americans they wished to “table it” (that is, bring it to the table). But to the Americans, tabling something meant putting it aside. “A long and even acrimonious argument ensued,” Churchill wrote, “before both parties realised that they were agreed on the merits and wanted the same thing.”
I heard a reference to a concession stand, and thought, hey, a concession can be something you obtain from said concession stand, or something you give up, as in “making a concession”.
I looked up the definition and it bears out the opposite meaning:
“a thing that is granted, especially in response to demands; a thing conceded.”
I’ve got one! Following standard rules of productive English grammar, “Unalaska” should mean “unlike Alaska”, but is actually a community in Alaska and therefore presumably Alaskan. The Wikipedia page implies that they do share a vaguely related etymology, although if “Alaska” means “mainland” and the “alaska” of “unalaska” means “peninsula”, they still come close to meaning their opposite in Aleut.
The “concession” in concession stand refers to the owner/runner of the venue conceding (contracting out to a third party) the right to sell in that location. A concession stand is not a place that sells concessions!
So I’m not seeing the opposite meanings here. It can refer to something conceded by you, or something conceded to you. But that’s just a difference in who’s doing the conceding.
The reason it was named that is because on a clear day you can see Unrussia from there.
Fine, I concede the point then. 
If you visited Alaska and then visited Unalaska, would you still have wanderlust?
Dust.
Doesn’t have to be a woman’s appearance. I love Jimmy Carter, but remember when a poll rated his performance as “Fair,” and he argued that where he comes from, that means great? (It was on a scale of Excellent – Good – Fair – Poor, IIRC.) Unfortunately can’t find a cite for this but I don’t think I’m making it up.
No, I rather think you’d blow up in a gigantic energy explosion.
You didn’t spell it out, but that’s an interesting one. When the type of dust is undesirable household dust, the verb means to remove it; otherwise it means to add it.
Which is why you should never ask Amelia Bedelia to dust the furniture.
If you haven’t visited Onalaska*† yet.
*Doesn’t matter which one: WI, WA, or TX.
†“On Alaska” is the fight song of the University of Alaska‡
‡OK, not true, but it should be.
“barred”, referring to being allowed to practice as a lawyer.
Seen in context: An article about Peter Navarro, who can’t make up his mind whether to act as his own lawyer. (Spoiler: He’s not a lawyer.) Bold added:
So when an attorney is admitted to the bar, they say he is “barred”? And if he later gets disbarred, then he is barred?
Somebody once discussed careless driving (this was on a Usenet soc.something thread, 35-some years ago), which the poster referred to as “wreckless driving”.
I felt compelled to nit-pick that. Wreckless driving, meaning driving without wrecks, is desirable. The opposite, wreckful driving, is to be avoided.
So reckless driving = wreckful driving;
wreckless driving = reckful driving.
Nice wordplay. Got me to thinking, did we recently have a thread of words commonly used, in which their opposite meaning has fallen into disuse? If not, maybe I read a story about it on Mentalfloss.com or something. ‘Reckless’ is one; nobody describes a careful person as ‘reck’, or ‘reckful’.
There are several, but the only other one I can think of off the top of my head right now is ‘unravel’. Nobody uses the word ‘ravel’ anymore, though it was used in Shakespeare’s time; at least, by Shakespeare: “sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care”. Though he used it in the sense we use ‘unravel’, so maybe it’s a ‘flammable / inflammable’ thing.
[/pre-coffee ramblings]
Would “biweekly” quality ? It means both every 2 weeks and every half-week, so basically is so ambiguous as to be useless. Same problem for “bimonthly”.
In French, we have “faire long feu”, which means “to fail”, and “ne pas faire long feu”, which should logically / syntactically be the opposite, but means “to fail/die after a short while”.
Sorry, I couldn’t wresist.
I think we did have such a thread around here somewhere.
The best-known such word, I think, is disgruntled, which happens when you get disgusted with your job. Employers do best when they keep their workers happily gruntled and gusted.
Biweekly means either twice a week or once every other week, not both, but nobody (this poster included) can ever remember which. Likewise with bimonthly.