words with contradictory meanings

Definition of fain (Entry 1 of 2)
1a : WILLING
he was very fain, for the young widow was "altogether fair and lovely … "
— Amy Kelly
b : being obliged or constrained : COMPELLED
Great Britain was fain to devote its whole energy … to the business of slaying and being slain
— G. M. Trevelyan

"performative" seems to have developed a couple of almost opposite meanings, not sure which definition came first

also: communism (no state vs supreme state)

nonplussed

(contradictory usage if not actual meaning but it ain't going away.)

Karen

I was reminded of this thread by an advert for a furniture store which uses Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell's "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing" as its soundtrack. Are they able to give those massive discounts they're always telling us about because their stuff is just cheap tat?

"fellow children" because sometimes it means you are a child and sometimes is means you are in fact masquerading as a child

spare:

being in excess of present need; free for other use: spare time.

frugally restricted or meager, as a manner of living or a diet: a spare regime.

Yeah that's good!

Beheaded

am i understanding these definitions correctly? 1 and 2 are opposite, no? even the “or” in 1b seems to point the two options in opposite directions

noesis

1 : purely intellectual apprehension:
a Platonism : the highest kind of knowledge or knowledge of the eternal forms or ideas —contrasted with dianoia

b in Husserl : the subjective aspect of or the act in an intentional experience —distinguished from noema

2 : cognition especially when occurring through direct knowledge

Handicap, as it applies in golf. Perhaps not contradictory but counter-intuitive

"Dust" is my favourite in this thread. Imagine that when it was time to do the sweeping you'd say "can you dirt the floor today please"

classic Amelia Bedelia scene depending on that one iirc

Hahahah

“the goat”

Ha, yes! Took me ages to figure out this new meaning, scratched my head many times on the way

contemporary!

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, November 28, 2018 7:51 AM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Off: turn off, set off (e.g. a fire alarm)

“turn” and “set” are different words

they're not the word in question.

well then you could say anything is contradictory! the word “turn” - turn up vs turn down etc

typcially to put something in an 'off' state - turn off, switch off - is to disable it or stop it. in some cases - set off, kick off - it can mean to enable or start. ok strictly speaking it's the phrase as a whole which has the meaning, nevertheless i find it curious and amusing that 'off' can be used in this way.

i think "off" in that second group is working more as "free" or "release" or "unleash". i agree that it's doing something different to turning off a switch

let's set off the fire extinguisher! no, turn it off, turn it off!

Fuck off

Not really just seemed like the thing to say

to ask someone to fuck off is not necessarily the same as wishing them to be fucked off

fuck away

no, it's not quite the same

fuck off the pain

The phrase “if not” in constructions like “it was a piece of showmanship worthy of Gaz Coombes, if not Hitler” is used to mean two basically contradictory things (“although not Hitler” vs “and even Hitler”)

Is that a reference to the Suella Braverman resignation letter?

i don't think this is a contradiction exactly, it's more like the establishment of a continuum without locating a specific place on the continuum

viz it's contradctory to say "i was in london and also i was in glasgow" but it's not contradictory to say "i was on the london-glasgow train" -- “it was a piece of showmanship worthy of Gaz Coombes, if not Hitler” is a way of saying "i was on the coombes-hitler train": you're indicating an evolution and a direction but not a distance

in a sense are we not all on the coombes-hitler train ?

I'll be in the Quiet coach.

i agree with the wins offering of if not as used

OK how about this:

the alarm's going off
vs
the television's going off (till you've done your homework)

the yoghurts going off

Hmm. I guess that to go off might mean lots of activity (go off on a tangent) or no activity (go off line) or unexpected activity (go off script) or unpleasant activity (go off on someone).

But these are set phrases, not sure that's the same thing as a word that might function as its own antonym.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=go+off+queen

Or go off your meds, which means to not take them, or go off message, which means to lose discipline. Go off queen is more like "lose control but in a good way."

as far as I'm concerned phrases are words and I think at least some linguists would back me up on this

these days when kids say bad they mean good

Lexemes, speech acts, sure (xp)

Egregious

Also, lol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce

as far as I'm concerned phrases are words and I think at least some linguists would back me up on this

Depends on what kind of phrase you are talking about. Phrasal verbs are pretty wordlike but they still have syntactic qualities most English words do not. Idiomatic phrases are even less wordlike (there is the non-compositional model of idiom processing that you could say treats them like words but it has problems and probably isn't right). The real question is do our explicit categories of "word" and "phrase" map onto how our brain processes language? A heavily analytic language like English is very misleading here... these categories may not exist at all.

In the last few comments, people are mixing phrasal verbs with non-phrasal ones which I would say is non-contradictory. "go off" (explode, rant freely) vs "go off script" are not parsed the same way by your brain. "go off" is a phrasal verb (verb + preposition, meaning cannot be determined by normal processing... you just have to learn what it means), while "go off script" is a verb + adjectival/adverbial phrase, not a phrasal verb. Same with "the alarm is going off" (phrasal verb) vs "the TV's going off" (verb + adjectival/adverbial phrase). Phrasal verbs can have multiple meanings, which I guess you could call homonyms in some sense ("the alarm is going off" and "the yogurt is going off"). Some of these can be contradictory... that gets you closer to what I'd call a contranymal phrase (a phrasal form of a contranym like cleave).

Apparent contradiction against the backdrop of general understanding is a hint you are experiencing the concinnity of human language.

It doesn't exactly fit with the thread, but the word "lucubration" does not mean anything like it sounds.

The concinnity of the bells, bells, bells

Some excellent work itt!

Re Coombes Hitler train: contradictory may not be exactly right but the not specifying the place on the continuum can create an ambiguity in scenarios where the distance between the different potential spots is particularly meaningful — ok this might not apply so much to my own example but in other cases

Writers will often throw in a quite to remove this ambiguity: “if not quite Hitler” unlikely to be understood as “maybe even quite Hitler”

?!