The Greenbelt

Language Liberalism Freethought Birds

Verbing Weirds Language only if you're expecting it to work in a simple way. This is a special case of the more general truth that Language Weirds.

Only when a republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is in the wrong. There is no other time.

The church says Earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence in a shadow than the church.

If we can't find Heaven, there are always bluejays.

Saturday, November 24, 2018

Borrowed and reversed

There's an example of an interesting phenomenon in yesterday's NYT crossword: a word or term borrowed from a narrow field - in this case, sports - that acquires the opposite connotation.

Here it's subpar, defined as "poor" where in golf it's good.

Another is pinch hitter; in real life, say giving a presentation, if you say "I'm pinch-hitting for Bob" you're warning the audience you probably won't be as good or knowledgeable as he, but in baseball a pinch hitter is supposed to do better (in the situation) than the guy being replaced.

1 comment:

Kathie11:01 PM, November 27, 2018
Your examples are more subtle than some of the famous ones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym#Examples_of_English-language_auto-antonyms
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