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Carpal Tunnel
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I thought everybody knew that. 
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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enantiAball is the women's team.
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Carpal Tunnel
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enantiAball is the women's team. You're so clever, can I be on the team? Or maybe be your sponsor? I'm on the point of getting puissant rich.  Meaning I stop being puissant poor.  Maybe this lambrusco is made from the feminine branches of the vine.
Last edited by BranShea; 02/14/08 07:20 PM.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Experiment to see if I can create a poll: so, a poll: PHP: O antagonym O contranym O enantiodrome Oh, Jackie! Did you already delete the poll table? I've given a very honest vote. It's fifty-fifty. Should there be a revote?
Last edited by BranShea; 02/15/08 08:00 AM.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Well--looks to me like it's got a few more hours before voting closes. Maybe somebody'll break the tie!
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old hand
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old hand
Joined: Feb 2008
Posts: 1,067 |
these have come up here several times (AHD4 gives sanction and cleave as examples). A couple of word guys have proposed neologisms to stand for the concept: contranym (Richard Lederer) and antagonym (Charles Ellis). It's not spelled out anywhere I can see, but I take it by a Janus word you mean a "two-faced" one that is capable of being used not just equivocally but antonymically, i.e. with exactly opposite meanings? Debatable whether sanction is precisely in this category. Near enough I suppose, but the positive usage means official approval for something and the negative usage means the penalty or trade consequences of the official disapproval of something, rather than the disapproval itself. The negative usage is almost invariably in the plural, also, as in "trade sanctions against Iran." Does it have to be a noun-noun or verb-verb correlation? Or can it be a verb-noun antonymic usage?
Last edited by The Pook; 02/21/08 04:53 AM.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
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if you look at any of the several lists of contranyms (to choose one term) that can be found online, the concept is very loosely applied; but then "exactly opposite meanings" in one word are probly fairly rare, assuming you can even get agreement on the meaning of 'exactly opposite.'
-joe (two-faced) friday
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Debatable whether sanction is precisely in this category. Near enough I suppose, but the positive usage means official approval for something and the negative usage means the penalty or trade consequences of the official disapproval of something, rather than the disapproval itself. AHD does list verb definitions in both senses. They do have the 'offical approval' vs. 'issue penalties for' difference that you object to but, as tsuwm pointed out, it's often difficult to get universal agreement on just what qualifies as opposite in definititons of words. It's not like my objections to the inclusion of 'cleave' in the list of janus words.
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old hand
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...because the two meanings have different etymology? And are listed as two separate words in dictionaries instead of two meanings of the same word? Guess it depends whether you're defining a Janus word by lexical meaning alone or real life usage. Is it the form or the accident? Does the form have a life of its own apart from its accident? Or when used in real life is it the same spelling so effectively and to all practical purposes the same word with a different meaning?
This also raises the question of whether words with the same spelling but different pronunciations qualify.
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it's just an interesting phenomenon, to me. there's nothing 'official' about any of this, and talking about qualifiers seems counterproductive. I mentioned the lists out there, and we could start a long, and no doubt vituperative thread about whether each word 'qualifies.'
Faldo likes to differentiate between a word which has developed opposite senses and two words that are homonyms (or homophones?) with opposite meanings. this is why I've (re)coined the word enantiodrome, which carries with it the characteristic of something which has become its own opposite over time.
cleave, then, are not an enantiodrome.
an interesting(?) exercise for the student might be to find an other such pair.
-joe (strange attractors) friday
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