I have said this before in threads like this but to me “flurry” sounds like it should be a lot of snow not a little.
If you’d ever seen a Duesenberg in its heyday, you might think otherwise.
“Sanguine” always makes me pause for a second. I have a friend who insists that “saunter” is the word describing the hunched over, Charlie Brown-like walk.
Absconding sounds more like admonishing than getting away.
petrichor does not sound, to me, as if it should be something pleasant petrichor and yet it is.
“‘Inflammable’ means flammable? What a country!” — Dr. Nick, The Simpsons
Similarly, autoantonyms are surprising: “Cleave” can mean either “separate from” or “join to”, and “oversight” can imply someone either was watching something or that they weren’t.
“Puce” is actually a cool color, but it sounds ugly, and it also sounds green. Probably snot-green. But it’s purplish.
“Fuchsia” sounds like another ugly color. Again, not.
I used to get very confused about whether “sanction” meant to approve of something, or to penalize something (because it didn’t have approval?). I still don’t know…
Uh, “livid” I don’t think means what most people think it means. However, CSI has helped with this, so I’m probably wrong about that, these days.
Terrible means really bad.
If something is horrific it is pretty bad.
Yet terrific means really good? I always struggle with that one.
‘Terrific’ used to be a value-neutral intensifier, like “A terrific explosion caused the man to leap erect and ejaculate ‘Hello, what’s this!?’” It gradually became a purely positive term.
(I might have fudged the linguistics a bit to make the quote above as bizarre as possible.)
Another autoantonym: It can mean either, depending on context.
In a CSI context, “lividity” contrasts with “pallor”: A livid region has had blood pooling in it, so it’s dark like a really bad bruise; a pallid region, on the other hand, has had blood drained from it, so it’s very pale.
Originally, someone who was “livid with rage” was red-faced, which jives with the “darkened” meaning, above. I think some people use that sense to mean “pale”, now, hence your confusion.
I used to think the same thing as a kid. And, well, as an adult. Actually, I thought that up until three minutes ago, so thanks!
It sounds pukey. Does anybody know where the name comes from? I’ve never been able to find any meaning for puce other than the color itself.
The word scrupulous always gives me pause—first of all, it sounds like it has something to do with cartilage, or some medical connection at any rate, and second, being German, I keep thinking it means the opposite of what it actually does mean—since skrupellos is German for unscrupulous.
Flea coloured, specifically the colour of the blood engorged belly or the stain left after one is crushed. How lovely! From the French.
There is however puce green whichWikipedia says may be a corruption of puke green or pus green.
For some reason “opaque” sounds like something should be partially transparent. It in fact means not transparent at all.
Ah. Merci.
Another one: redress. Sounds like it should mean “putting on clothes again”, but actually means “to remedy or set right”.
Once I noticed that the phrase “out of whack” was generally applied to situations that had plenty of whack, I couldn’t hear it without giggling a little inside.
Etymonline.com is a good resource for these questions in lieu of having the OED at hand. See here the entry on “puce.”
contumely doesn’t sound like something bad at all. More like praise, something to do with poise; or maybe demeanor or elegance. Nothing of the sort.
The phrase “to pan out” always makes me think “oh, it didn’t work.”
My internal monologue processes this along the lines of panning for gold and you didn’t get any, so you’re stopping…maybe tapping out of the activity?
I don’t have an OED handy and American Heritage isn’t much help on this phrase.
I can’t even blame my confusion on French–I’m not that good–where “en panne” is how you describe your broken-down car.