Asklemmy

43945 readers

638 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

158

What's a word you've spent a long time not using right? (lemm.ee)

submitted 11 months ago by shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

255 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Just recently I was in a conversation with a number of UK mainlanders and we had a debate over what "tories" meant, apparently disproportionately ordinarily it refers to a political party and it's not usual to use it as short for "territories" as I've used it (according to how the debate ended, it was half and half between them). And once again I'm reminded of how people feel to look back at their usage of a word/phrase over the years and cringe.

More tragically, me and a friend were embarrassed once upon realizing everyone was confusing "encephalitis" with "hydrocephalus" when talking to someone about their kid with hydrocephalus. Awkward because encephalitis is caused by HIV.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What good is a word that’s self contradictory

Words like those are common enough, and there's normally no problem in understanding them. When's the last time you misunderstood the word clip or dust?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contronym?useskin=vector

[–] savedbythezsh@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 months ago

That's cool! I've never heard of a contronym before.

However the difference is that most of those have different usages - e.g. if you say "I'm going to clip the hedges" vs "I'm going to clip something to the hedges", you have to use the word differently. With "dust", it's different based on the context, because you need to be talking about some sort of powder to be talking about putting something on. If I said "I'm going to dust the furniture", you would assume I meant clean, but if I said "dust the furniture with cleaning powder", you'd probably understand the difference. Different locations and activities also help here (e.g. skiing, cake decorating, cleaning, etc).

Nonplussed on the other hand likely derives its alternate meaning from an incorrect understanding of the original meaning, and so it's used in the exact same manner and context to mean the exact inverse. If I say the sentence "he was nonplussed at the news", which meaning am I referring to?

"Table" is another contronym that's ACTUALLY confusing (learned that one from this post as well).