Is there one for a word that does describe itself?
Autological. Examples: 'short', 'English', 'polysyllabic', 'autological'.
The opposite is heterological, examples being 'long', 'monosyllabic', 'German'.
A friend suggested the term 'autophenonymous', which led me to muse as follows:
The Mystery of “Non-autophenonymous”.
Assume there is a class of words, which we shall call autophenonymous words. To be a member of the class, for any word (“*”), the following statement shall be true:
‘”*” is a * word’.
Examples of autophenonymous words are “polysyllabic”, “unambiguous” and “English”.
Some words may be autophenonymous in some years but not in others. Examples are “hot”, “cool”, and “fashionable”.
Some words may be autophenonymous in some senses but not in others. “Philosophical” is autophenonymous when used in the phrase “Goedel’s theorem poses an important philosophical problem”, but is not autophenonymous when used in the phrase “He was philosophical about his inability to disprove Goedel’s theorem”.
Some words may be autophenonymous in some contexts but not others. In the (con)text I am now constructing the following words are autophenonymous: “typed”, “unspoken”, "red".
Let us call the class of all words which are not autophenonymous, non-autophenonymous words. Some people would object to this because it combines Greek and Latin prefixes in one word. Never mind.
To be a member of the class of non-autophenonymous words, for any word (“*”), the following statement shall be false:
‘”*” is a * word’.
The fact that some words, depending on when, how or where they are used may sometimes be autophenonymous and sometimes non-autophenonymous does not challenge the proposition that every word can be classed as either autophenonymous or non-autophenonymous. It merely requires us to be rather specific about the word we are classifying.
However, the word “non-autophenonymous” is (perhaps uniquely) different. It is neither autophenonymous nor non-autophenonymous.
This can be demonstrated as follows.
Let us assume “non-autophenonymous” is autophenonymous.
If so, applying the formula ‘”*” is a * word’, it must be true to state:
‘”non-autophenonymous” is a non-autophenonymous word’.
A corollary of this statement is that ”non-autophenonymous” is not an autophenonymous word. Our initial assumption, that ”non-autophenonymous” is autophenonymous, must therefore be false.
Now let us assume that “non-autophenonymous” is non-autophenonymous. If so, then the following statement must be true:
‘“non-autophenonymous” is a non-autophenonymous word.’
However, applying the formula for non-autophenonymous words, we know that this statement must be false. Therefore, our assumption that “non-autophenonymous” is non-autophenonymous, can not be true either.
In other words “non-autophenonymous” is neither autophenonymous nor non-autophenonymous, no matter when, how or where it is used. It is, in a word, a mystery.
This mystery is an application of Goedel’s theorem, which states, more or less, that no number, linguistic or logical system is so complete that it can solve all the mysteries it can conjure up. To put it in a more positive way, any number, linguistic or logical system worth its salt is capable of generating genuine mysteries (in the sense that they’re insoluble within the system). Goedel not only formulated this proposition, but he actually proved it, and Hofstatder takes the unititiated through the proof in his book ‘Goedel, Escher, Bach – An Eternal Golden Braid’.
It’s a provocative thesis with profound theological implications: to me Goedel’s theorem suggests that not only does human consciousness formulate Big Questions which it can not ever answer, but that divine consciousness (or whatever), however easily it may be able to unravel the mysteries we humans dimly perceive, will formulate even Bigger Questions which it can’t answer either.
