For me, this happens with the word “levity.” I totally understand what the word means, yet every time I hear it, I think of something heavy and ponderous and serious . . . exactly the opposite of its actual meaning. It takes me a few seconds to remind myself of the word’s actual meaning.
Does this happen to you?
“Chartreuse”. It’s supposed to mean a deep blushing red, damnit.
Enervate.
Condone. It sounds so close to condemn that my mind immediately subs it in place.
Yeah, “peruse.” I always immediately think “skim,” though it actually means to examine very carefully.
Yes! Meanwhile puce should be the name of the color that we call chartreuse.
I think part of that is that you almost always here it in the context of telling someone not to do something… “I don’t condone this”.
I always thought that was what it meant. Looking it up, I see it has two definitions.
I could see #2 to mean skimming.
Interesting…I could have sworn that that usage was proscribed by the OED or somesuch, but now I feel less bad about all the times I used it to mean “skim.”
Thrive. Since I learnt the word from various nature documentaries that invariably used it in the sentence: Despite [various difficulties and predators] the [species] manages to thrive. I interpreted it as meaning manages to survive but only barely.
chagrin… Just seemed it should be amusement…
later, Tom.
“Mirth” is not a happy word, even though I try to convince myself otherwise.
The OED exists only to describe language as it is used, not to comment on ‘correct’ or ‘wrong’ usages, and in fact has a little bit of information about this. Mods, I apologize if this quote is outside of the bounds of fair use.
In any case I’ve now found another one of my own. I could have sworn ‘proscribe’ meant to establish the use of something; of course I was confusing it with ‘prescribe’.
Whenever someone says the word “cleave” I immediately think of its opposite.
How do you define it?
Cleave is what is sometimes called a contranym because it is its own antonym like with, sanction, clip, moot, oversight, dust and a number of other words.
These are the jokes.
I always confuse sleet and hail, because sleet sounds like an icy sort of word and hail sounds like a slushy sort of word.
It’s supposed to mean “joyful” but “mirth” is just not a joyful sounding word.
Auspicious to me sounds too much like ominous.
It does. Wait, I will look it up for a cite.
…Well you learn something new every day. Yellow/Green Huh? That the dumbest thing I have heard today.