There has been a lot of ranting and raving in the Australian papers recently by Peter Ryan, Commissioner for NSW Police, about the number of organisations and committees that he has to make reports to. I was struck by a particular complaint he made - 'I get oversighted by people who haven't got a bloody clue.'

Point one: unbelievably revolting verbing of a noun!

More significantly, this set me thinking about a group of related words.

1. to oversee - to supervise or look after, implying a requirement to pay close attention to
2. to overlook - to forget, miss out, not pay close attention to
3. oversight - the act of overlooking something.

Wha-at? Does anyone else think this doesn't make sense? To me, seeing and sight are closely linked, but here, they are used in compound words with diametrically opposite meanings. Anyone know why or how? Anyone have any other examples like this?

Oversight:-

My partner was asked to join a website oversight committee. I suggested he refuse on the basis that the committee should not be encouraging oversights anyway. Grrrrr!

oversee and overlook are staples on lists of "contranyms"
[yart alert]. they have arrived in this sorry (but interesting) state through a process of enantiodromia. as to other enantiodromic words, examples have been discussed elsewhere but a somewhat related one is 'peruse'.

I think what actually happens with these is that a particular meaning becomes generalized and then re-particularized in the opposite direction. e.g., with peruse the original meaning was specifically to read with all due attention, then it came to mean just to read, and now is likely meant to convey casual reading without attention to detail.

tsuwm, I've obviously missed out on something here! To me, 'peruse' would always and only mean to read carefully.

And you keep claiming you're the OP!

I have often seen the word peruse in business correspondence and it was always meant as >read over carefully< also.

A bit of clarification, can you explain enantiodromic.

I have found entantio- : a learned borrowing from Greek meaning "opposite" used in the formulation of compound words AND enantiosis: a figure of speech in which what is meant is the opposite of what is said; irony.

-dromia and dromic I did not find at all.

side note...dag tsuwm, I have to keep a dictionary by my side whenever I read your posts. I don't feel ignorant by any stretch as I have often been told that my grasp of the English language is better than most however, I do feel less learned than you are in this area. Just to allay my curiosity, do you talk like you write? Are there little tsuwmlets or a lady tsuwm running around that write like you?

enantiodromia is taken from another Greek word which means running in opposite ways; it is a process by which something becomes its opposite, and the subsequent interaction of the two: applied esp. to the adoption by an individual or by a community of a set of beliefs opposite to those held at an earlier stage.

at some point the word was applied to contranyms, as an enantiodromic word, in the case where the meaning started out at one end of a spectrum and evolved over time to the opposite end. why? because people insist that there be a word that they can apply to a concept.
-tsuwm

as to whether the wwftd master talks as he writes, I could tell you that it is so, but the truth is that when it comes to verbalizing he suffers from aphasia.
-joe friday

To me, 'peruse' would always and only mean to read carefully.

I disagree B & b!

For me it could mean "having a casual glance at" as in
He perused the books on the shelves, but couldn't find anything of interest.

This wouldn't mean that he examined the title of every single book on the shelves in a painstakingly accurate fashion. In fact it's almost another "browse" equivalent.

Business use different, perhaps?

All right, I decided to stop being a lazy pootz about it and LIU.

Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary (my one and only source of English info) states:

peruse v.t., 1. to read through, as with thoroughness or care: to peruse a report. 2. to read. 3. Archaic. to survey or examine in detail.

Webster's 10th Collegiate is as ambiguous as it gets:

1 a : to examine or consider with attention and in detail : STUDY

b : to look over or through in a casual or cursory manner

2 : READ; especially : to read over in an attentive or leisurely manner

I think M-W is ahead of the curve on this; let's see what our old friend Michael Quinion has to say about it:

http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-per1.htm

 'I get oversighted by people who haven't got a bloody clue.'//oversight - the act of overlooking something.

I am the only one who disagrees with the defination of oversight? the commissioner could have been clearer and said i get over seen by.... but it seems clear to me he was refering to oversight committies, who have the job to oversee police action, and not to over look it!

M-W 10th puts oversight in the same catagory as peruse-- one meaning to pay close attention to-- (oversight committee meaning) and another meaning--forgotten, overlooked (i meant to spell check the document before i printed it, it was an oversight that it went out with a typo!)

i would read the word as it made the most sense-- the NYTimes cross word puzzle editor uses the peruse as a clue often-- sometimes it is used to mean glance, sometimes study!