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Posted by Alicia Rasley

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Contranyms—When the Same Word Has Opposite Meanings

NYMS!  Nym is a suffix that stands for “word,” and it’s usually used for word pairs.  We all know about “homonyms” (sound-alike words, like “to, too, two”) and synonyms (like-meaning words, like “adore and worship, hate and detest”), and also antonyms (opposite-meaning words, like “hate and love”).

Well, there’s another type of “nym,” word pairs that partake in combination of forms above. They are spelled alike, and often sound alike, and they also mean the opposite. For example, “oversight” can mean close supervision (The oversight committee is reviewing the bank records), or carelessly omitting something (Due to a clerical oversight, I didn’t pay that bill).

A few others:

• I left the room, and Jamie was left behind.
• He clipped off the bottom of the page, and paper-clipped it to the folder.
• I asked the singer to refrain from singing “It’s a Small World After All,” because I was so tired of hearing its refrain.

Often one form of the word is a noun, and the other is a verb to get rid of the noun, like:

• We need to dust the living room, as Mom is allergic to dust.
• This recipe says to skin the salmon before cooking, but I think much of the flavor is in the skin.
• Sarah seeded the watermelon because she was afraid the baby would choke on the seeds.

Another cause of a contranym is when the second meaning comes from one aspect of the original meaning. “Bolt” is a good example of this. A bolt originally referred to a short arrow, like a crossbow bolt. Soon the attribute (short, sharp, cylindrical) was used to describe the rod or pin that secured a door or lock. This is when the word “bolt” became a verb—to bolt the door.

But the original meaning (a projectile like crossbow bolt) inspired another verb, to make a rapid, straight action—to bolt down the street. So now these opposite meanings of fastening and fleeing are both common. She bolted the door, then bolted down the street.

I just found another contranym. I was listening to the audiobook of Ben Aaronovitch’s The Hanging Tree, about a constable in London who investigates crimes involving magic. After one rich debutante dies from some unknown occult injury, Peter is tasked with interviewing one of her teen friends. When he sees her, he observes, “I was beginning to think there was a factory somewhere, stamping out dangerously skinny rich girls, with good deportment and a nervous disposition.” When I first heard that line, I thought he meant “eliminating” (this is a murder mystery, after all) the girls, that is, like “I stamped out the campfire and poured the can of water to douse all the sparks.”

Two opposite meanings– to create by stamping out identical copies of a product in a factory, and to extinguish or suppress something unwanted. Now how did that happen? I suspect that in this case, it’s a “phonological simplification”, where a word that’s a bit hard to pronounce over time becomes simpler (like “knight–kuh-night”, eventually everyone dropped the “kuh” and just said “night”) . We see this most commonly in children just learning to speak– you know, “bue” instead of “blue,” and “Gaga” instead of “great-grandmother”. But in fact, one of the most significant events in the history of the English language– the “Great Vowel Shift” or GVS– was a phonological simplification on a whole-language scale. To put it simply, in the Middle Ages, many vowel sounds moved forward and upward in the mouth to become longer vowels. (This is one reason our pronounced words don’t match the spelling– spelling remained fixed because, well, writing is permanent, while pronunciation can change radically in a generation.)

This “forward movement” was most common with “long” vowels (a as in ‘hat” become a as in “hate), but the short-o becomes short-a in stomp out/stamp out is similar. The short “o” is formed in the bottom back of the mouth, the back of the tongue. The short “a” is forward in the mouth, with the tongue touching the teeth.  So while we still say “stomp” sometimes when referring to a movement of the foot, we just as often say “stamp” as in “Rumpelstiltskin stamps his foot in fury.” There already was the existing word “stamp”, which can describe a similar type of downward movement (“he stamped his seal on the visa form”), so the stomp/stamp drift was almost inevitable. Oddly though, when the verb become a “phrasal verb” (stamp out– verb + preposition), “stamp out” came to have two opposite meanings.

The Dangerous Contranyms

With a contranym, the meaning is supposed to be determined by the context. But obviously because they can have opposite meanings, there is always a chance for ambiguity and misinterpretation. So they have to be used carefully and with enough context given that the reader/listener will arrive at the right meaning. This is especially important in legal documents. For example, let’s say in a contract, there’s the statement: Minor breaches of this clause will be met with a sanction.

Does that mean the breach will be met with some sanction or penalty, or that it will be “sanctioned” or allowed? Attorneys will replace the contranym with synonyms so that there is no ambiguity or misinterpretation. So: Minor breaches of this clause will be met with immediate penalty. Or—Minor breaches of this clause will be allowed.

Here’s one contranym that has fortunately fallen into disuse. When I was growing up, the word “inflammable” sometimes meant, uh, flammable. REALLY flammable. Like, This is INflammable because it should never be set on fire. Obviously a misinterpretation of this could be dangerous, so pretty soon “inflammable-meaning-highly-flammable” was avoided, and “flammable” became the universal warning word.

Literally, a Linguistic Earthquake! A New Contranym!

We can see a word becoming a contranym right now—the word “literally”. It used to mean exactly, strictly:  “The judge said that clause has to be interpreted literally.” And to the horror of purists, the youngsters use it, well, figuratively: “I was so mad, I literally hit the ceiling.”

This is a result of the word being used as an “intensifier” like “very” or “really”. (I notice that both those intensifiers “very” and “really” come from words that used to mean “literal truth”—verity and reality.)  So “literally” now is used to intensify or dramatize the experience being described, particularly if it’s not strictly true.

Awful=Awesome

We sticklers might decry this “semantic bleaching,” where words are bleached of their specific meaning. But historically, this is pretty common. An example is the word “awful,” which used to mean, well, awesome (positive), and now means the negative. How did that happen? Well, “awful” came from “being full of awe” and then became used to describe what inspired the awe: The king in his armor was an awful sight (meaning awe-inspiring).

But over time, the idea of overwhelming power came to inspire dread and fear as well as awe. So “awful” came to mean “dreadful” or “frightful.” And “awesome” took over the original meaning of awe-inspiring.

Okay, one more contranym, and this is a clever one! The word “homonym” (“same name”) ended up with two different meanings—same sound/different spelling (too/to/two) and same spelling/different sound (polish and Polish).

So linguists broke the term into two, and distinguished between sound and spelling. A “homophone” now refers to different-meaning words that sound alike but are spelled differently, and a “homograph” refers to words that are spelled alike but sound differently. I’ve also seen the “homograph” referred to (confusingly) as “heteronym,” which are related words that are spelled alike but pronounced differently to indicate different meanings: “We live in Las Vegas and attend many live concerts.”

Bottom line: As we write and speak, we should be aware of the potential for ambiguity or misinterpretation. So today, when I had my 18^th Century character refer to “aught,” I stopped and considered, did I mean “any” or “none”?

I meant “none,” so I went back and substituted “naught”!

https://bookviewcafe.com/contranyms-when-the-same-word-means-the-opposite/

https://bookviewcafe.com/?p=20764