Bad
something is not good, or something is very good
Did the papers really do that? The New York Times is known to be an outlier (in the US) in that it uses honorifics. Most simply use the last name. Quickly looking at the Chicago Tribune from 1984, she was simply referred to as Ferraro on second reference and onward.
Just looked at the cite cited herein and it’s part of the list, as a homograph:
- Resign works as a contronym in writing. This time we have homographs, but not homophones. “Resign,” meaning ‘to quit,’ is spelled the same as “resign,” meaning ‘to sign up again,’ but it’s pronounced differently.
I don’t see it. Figuratively is the opposite, and literarily isn’t the same.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen re-sign spelled as resign in writing, just for the reason that the spelling introduces ambiguity and confusion. I’m not saying it hasn’t happened, but I’d be willing to bet the style guides and dictionaries recommend the hyphenated spelling.
Don’t see any actual opposite meanings in there.
The “in-” in inflamable is actually a different prefix than the one in inflexible. It’s usually written “en-” and can be found in various words like engulf and encompass. Perhaps we should change the spelling to enflamable.
“Literally” is figuratively its own opposite, but is literally not.
To me, literally has literally one meaning.
But to some other people it has literally millions.
Arabic auto-antonyms have constituted a whole subfield of Arabic philology for centuries, whole books being written about them. They’re called الأضداد al-aḍdād, ‘the contraries’.
السُّدْفة al-sudfah means both ‘in the darkness’ and ‘in the light’
الصريم al-ṣarīm means both ‘night’ and ‘day’.
الناهل al-nāhil means both ‘thirsty’ and ‘someone who drank their fill’
being a few examples.
Two phrases that come to mind:
‘Its downhill from now on’
[a] - plain-sailing, easy, cruisy
** - getting progressively worse
‘[something] is Mickey Mouse’
[a] - shiny, new, excellent [a particularly Australian usage, rhyming slang for grouse, as in shiny, new, excellent]
** - inconsequential, cheap and nasty, a piece of shit
Banksiaman: What is shiny and new about pheasant-like wildfowl?
Johanna: Are any of those words homophones – “convergent evolution” of unrelated root words – or else are they truly single words that somehow evolved to have opposite meanings?
The opposite of literally is figuratively. The alternate use of literally is not instead of figuratively, it is an intensifier. Its use is still actually the same as it normally is but you aren’t meant to take it literally.
Compare it to other intensifiers and exaggerations. “I saw billions of cats on the side of the road today.” Well, no you didn’t, you saw lots and you are exaggerating for effect by saying “billions”, but that doesn’t mean that billions is being used in an opposite sense to how it is normally used, it’s just being used as an exaggeration, it still means multiples of a thousand million, even if that is not actually how many cats there were. Likewise with literally, it is not used in place of “figuratively”.
We have a popular news-plus-music-plus phone-in radio show here at lunch time. When the current presenter (a journalist) was fairly new, he was doing an item based on a report of a leaking fuel tanker. After the experts had pontificated, a tanker driver phoned in with a sensible comment about safety and he talked about “flammable” loads. The presenter interrupted him (destroying the point of his comment) and told him that he meant “inflammable” to the general annoyance of everyone who knew that the “in” prefix had been officially dropped some years earlier to prevent confusion.
The point of the story is that here was a journo correcting someone who did that stuff for a living. He did apologize the following day.
Right you are. I literally didn’t think it through.
Even more fun is the practice of building up chains of synonyms such that the endpoints of the chain are antonyms.
For example, take the words stay and depart—these are antonyms, because the usual meaning of stay is “to remain in a certain location”, while depart typically means “to leave a certain location”. But there is another, not uncommon sense of the word stay, meaning “to cease or prevent movement”. Therefore we can say that stop, which also means “to cease or prevent movement”, is a synonym of stay. Similarly, stop and quit are synonyms, in the sense of ceasing an activity: to quit smoking, for example, is the same thing as to stop smoking. Finally, quit and depart are synonyms, because they can both mean “to leave a certain location”. So we have just “proven” that stay and depart are not only antonyms but also synonyms (or maybe contronyms).
If this sort of thing interests anyone, a while back I wrote a piece for Word Ways that lists a bunch of these antonymic synonym chains. Or if you prefer a challenge, you can try your hand at constructing the chains yourself with this contronym puzzle of mine from Babel: The Language Magazine.
Oh, they fairly gleam with a brisk polish, they do.
Alternately, grouse is an Australian expression which apparently comes from northern or Scottish dialects. If something is grouse its pretty good, and the transfer to Mickey Mouse is probably rhyming slang.
Grouse is still in reasonably wide use I think, while the only time I ever heard Mickey Mouse actually said by an old codger i had to ask which of the meanings he intended.
Banskiaman, got it – “grouse” is Australian slang for “awesome” (perhaps originally a blend of “great” and “fabulous.”)
Edit: Ninja’d! 
Thanks.
Exactly, it sometimes is used as an intensifier for a clichéd metaphor essentially meaning “I know that the following figurative phrase is bandied about a lot, but this time it really is appropriate”.
I’m guessing this is similar to how the English word “day” can mean “period of daylight” OR “24-hour period,” and in Arabic the “24-hour period” meaning is associated with “night” (in English, we think this way when booking hotel reservations, for example).
Korean is full of homophones due to derivation of a lot of the vocabulary from Chinese (though sometimes via Japanese or Korean coinage of terms) but lack of tonal disambiguation in Modern Korean of Chinese characters of otherwise similar sound. This is probably influenced by the modern dominance of the alphabet which likewise does not disambiguate (in very ambiguous cases even native readers are sometimes aided by writing the word parenthetically in Chinese characters). A few end up being homophone antonyms, for example:
방화 banghwa can be 放火=arson or 防火=fire prevention (Fànghuǒ and Fánghuǒ in Mandarin but I believe the first is a Japanese coinage, not the usual word in Chinese)
실권 shilgweon can be 失權=loss of power or 實權=real power (Shīquán and Shíquán)
Are any of the examples in this thread exact opposites? When you sanction an event, you agree to let it to take place under a certain set of laws or rules. “Sanction” (in the sense of punishment) is applied to a person who breaks those rules. Very different usages, but I wouldn’t call them perfect antonyms, either. By that standard, I think “scale” counts.