Just the opposite
Many people trying to work their way through the thicket of English try to reason their way clear by analogy. That’s a treacherous path, because English encompasses many contradictions from its mongrel past.
If English were a logical language, it’s doubtful that it would have a collection of words that bear directly opposite meanings.
Cleave, for example: If peanut butter makes your tongue stick to the roof of your mouth, your tongue cleaves to your palate. But if you split firewood with an ax, you cleave it. To sanction something means either to approve of it or forbid it. Oversight is either supervision or negligence. If you trim the Christmas tree, you add things to it; if you trim the hedge, you cut things off.
I suppose it is possible — though I by no means endorse this — that certain blurred meanings that we prescriptivists denounce as misuses may be words in transition from one meaning to a double meaning. Imply, for example, has been taking on the opposite sense of infer for decades. Anxious, in casual speech, can mean either anxiety about something or eagerness for it. People often use literally to mean figuratively. Peruse might mean to skim, or it might mean to read carefully; so might scan. (And please, don’t get started on what I could care less means.)
Even though I recoil in distaste at these blurrings of meaning, and school my students and my copy desk colleagues to avoid them, I have to concede that they are usually clear in context. So if there can be no objection to them on the ground of clarity of meaning, then shunning them becomes a matter of idiosyncratic taste.
Oh Lord, something is happening to me. I must have been looking at Language Log too much. Unclean, unclean!
Comments
I feel your pain. I, too, have a hard time biting my tongue when people misuse particular words or phrases. I think one of the biggest lines I draw is between spoken language and written language. If I'm editing something, and someone's misused I could care less, then I'll fix it because it's incorrect. I'm not going to correct my drinking buddies when we're out, though; that's just asinine.
Posted by: JB Dryden | April 1, 2008 10:49 AM
I draw a similar line, JB. Correcting one's drinking buddies on grammar is a good way to end up drinking alone.
Posted by: Lancaster | April 1, 2008 12:38 PM
Wait. . .I was reading your entry, wondering at first why you are the only blog writer I subscribe to that DIDN'T do an April Fools entry. . .then I saw this:
Even though I recoil in distaste at these blurrings of meaning ... I have to concede that they are usually clear in context. So if there can be no objection to them on the ground of clarity of meaning, then shunning them becomes a matter of idiosyncratic taste.
Ah, there it is. APRIL FOOLS!! :-P
Posted by: Denise | April 1, 2008 2:48 PM
'I could care less' instead of "I couldn't care less" is just one of my many buttons. Others include "another thing coming" instead of "another think coming" and "power for the course" instead of "par for the course." Maybe I just need to get a life.
Posted by: Clay Walnum | April 4, 2008 9:55 AM
"intensive purposes" vs. "intents and purposes"?
Posted by: Ben | April 4, 2008 4:57 PM
I hope nobody here pulls any of this crap on a first date. Irregardless.
Posted by: Jim Thomsen | April 5, 2008 1:21 AM
Usually clear in context, yes, but occasionally one of these usage mutations incurs real amgiguity. I've been watching the replacement of the construction "to substitute x for y" with another, "to substitute y with x"; and sure enough, I have finally encountered instances of a hybrid:"to substitute x with y" -- with the newer preposition, but without the logically necessary reversing of the nouns. The result, obviously, was the opposite of what was intended -- although this was far from immediately obvious in context. Messy.
Posted by: jhughes | April 6, 2008 8:24 PM