cj Sez: I hope your December holiday celebrations were wonderful,
and you made many lovely memories. Now, as Draft2Digital told me in a recent
email: “It’s time to soar in 2024!”
I want to continue my last contronym post with just a few more
examples from the article “40 Words and Phrases That Are Their Own Opposites” by
Judith Herman.
14. Clip Clip can mean “to
bind together” or “to separate.” You clip sheets of paper to together or
separate part of a page by clipping something out. Clip is a pair of
homographs, words with different origins spelled the same. Old
English clyppan, which means “to clasp with the arms, embrace, hug,”
led to our current meaning, “to hold together with a clasp.” The other clip, “to cut or snip (a part) away,” is from Old
Norse klippa, which may come from the sound of a shears.
15. Continue usually means “to persist in doing
something,” but as a legal term it
means “to stop a proceeding temporarily.”
16. Fight with can be interpreted three ways. “He
fought with his mother-in-law” could mean “They argued,” “They served together
in the war,” or “He used the old battle-ax as a weapon.” (Thanks to linguistics
professor Robert Hertz for this idea.)
17. Flog, meaning “to punish by caning or whipping,” showed
up in school slang of the 17th century, but now it can have the contrary
meaning, “to promote persistently,” as in “flogging a new book.” Perhaps
that meaning arose from the sense “to urge (a horse, etc.) forward by whipping,” which grew
out of the earliest meaning.
18. Go means “to proceed,” but also “give out or fail,”
i.e., “This car could really go until it started to go.”
19. Hold up can mean “to support” or “to hinder”: “What
a friend! When I’m struggling to get on my feet, he’s always there to hold me
up.”
20. Out can mean “visible” or “invisible.” For example,
“It’s a good thing the full moon was out when the lights went out.”
21. Out Of Out of means “outside” or “inside”: “I hardly get out
of the house because I work out of my home.”
22. Toss Out Toss out could be either “to suggest” or “to discard”:
“I decided to toss out the idea.”
23. Peer Peer is a person of equal status (as in a jury of one’s
peers), but some peers are more equal than others, like the members of the
peerage, the British or Irish nobility.
24. Original According to Dictionary.com, original can mean
either “belonging to the beginning of something” or “new, fresh, inventive.”
That’s it for this thread on Lyrical Pens. To read the rest
of the article, click on this link and enjoy: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/57032/25-words-are-their-own-opposites
§§
For writers and readers: The link below is to a recent article on Jane
Friedman’s blog directed to writers, but I think there are some clues in there that would serve any parent
of a teen well: https://janefriedman.com/4-things-every-ya-writer-should-know-about-teens/
§§
Okay, that’s the post for today. You-all guys keep on
keeping on, and I’ll try to do the same. Raising prayers for a happy and safe
you and yours.
cj
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