Lately I’ve had the word “spurious” stuck in my head as the go-to word for “random bits and pieces”. The thing is that I know what spurious means, but for some reason, just lately, I keep misusing it.
For example, a report was due. It was supposed to be delivered to me last week. Instead of getting the full report, I got a few paragraphs on Monday, a few more scraps on Tuesday, a chunk on Wednesday, then revised versions of the Monday paragraphs came in again a few days later.
I started emailing the guy: “Why are you sending me spurious bits of information?”… What??? That’s not what I want to say! Yet it somehow feels right, like the word has the right flavor for what I mean.
And I can’t think of the real word that I want either, but “spurious” isn’t it. :mad: Stupid word.
Perhaps some pedantic person will now tell me that either way it means a law or treaty touches on something. Nevertheless, I have found it interesting.
As long as we are also covering meaning/antonym vagueness in some examples in this thread, I submit ravel. It is apparently its own “antonym” in that it is synonymous with unravel. () I think that if we were to streamline English one of the other should go. Logically, the first “should” mean the opposite of the second, but there is no word in the same word “family” that is the opposite-- We would use knit or unite or somesuch word depending on the context.
I gather that the “raveling” of fibers originally meant their becoming tangled and twisted together in a disorganized way; to “unravel” was to separate them in an organized way. Apparently the idea of tangled fibers became confused with the idea of woven fibers (i.e., twisted together in an organized way), so the useful meaning of the root word was lost.
Inflammable is actually older, dating from at least the seventeenth century, versus the nineteenth for flammable. The former comes from the Latin inflammare; the latter arises from mistaking the in- for the negating prefix, when it is in fact more akin to, ah, en-.
“Protagonist”. Something about the “Pro” start to the word makes me connect it to “protest” and “provoke” and words like that. It only makes sense to me when paired with “Antagonist”, which just sounds like “antagonize”, which is what an “antagonist” does.
I also had problems with “opaque” for a long time.
“Federal/federalism/federalist” is another word that can be considered its own opposite.
Lots of people have trouble with “proscribe.” It generally means “forbidden by rule,” but you see it when people mean to say “prescribe” and want to sound more formal.
What would you say is the proper definition of “epicenter”? My dictionary says
[quote]
noun - the point on the earth’s surface vertically above the focus of an earthquake.[ul][li]figurative - the central point of something, typically a difficult or unpleasant situation : the patient was at the epicenter of concern.[/ul][/li][/quote]
Both protagonists and antagonists agon-ize, or contend. The proto-agonist is the first-contender (think “first person”), the anti-agonist is the opposed-contender. “Antagonize” comes from “antagonist,” rather than the other way round. It would make more sense to just say “agonize” rather than “antagonize,” but that’s come to mean the pain one endures in the struggle, rather than the struggle itself.
I didn’t realize that usage had actually made it into dictionaries. (Curse you, descriptivists, draining meaning from my language!)
The proper definition of “epicenter,” is firstly the technical one related to earthquakes. (The origin point of the quake, always some distance underground, is the “focus” or “hypocenter.”) I’d accept using it in non-earthquake contexts to mean the nearest reachable or visible point to a hidden central or origin point.
Using it as just a generic synonym for “center” is wrong because it’s unnecessary fancifying (“epi-” adds no meaning), and because it subverts usages in which the prefix is relevant.
There’s always the most inappropriately-sonicky (thanks for the word, purple cow!), the slightly archaic one, “droll”. For a long time thought it meant dull and depressing. But Merriam-Webster online defines this word as “having a humorous, whimsical, or odd quality…” etc. italics mine-
whimsical/droll
droll/whimsical
Nope, no matter which way you put it, it doesn’t seem to fly. The closest i can imagine “droll” to humorous is maybe a kind of dry sarcastic humor, but whimsical?
As to my own confusions: as a kid I used to think “laud” and “laudable” and the like meant the opposite of what they do. Now, as a middle-aged person, I still have to pause and mentally smack myself into the correct interpretations whenever they show up.
Nah, I think I’m thinking more along the lines of “sporadic” but since he was giving me little tidbits and nothing substantial, I needed a word that sounded like it would suit the work produced by some little critter that shreds paper. And “spurious” has the right sound to it.
“The spurious hamster shredded the paper.”
See? Doesn’t “spurious” sound like it really ought to be a word associated with some dimwitted, little fuzzball?
What??? That’s not what I want to say! Yet it somehow feels right, like the word has the right flavor for what I mean.