It Either Is Or It Isn’t…Isn’t it?

I learned something new recently and while that isn’t Front Page News it does merit mention on these pages. What surprised me about this is that it had to do with the English language. I’m pretty good with my native language but this was something completely new to me.

I’m talking about: CONTRONYMS.

Growing up I learned about Synonyms, Homonyms, Antonyms, Paronyms, Pseudonyms, and even Acronyms, but I never heard of Contronyms.

Contronyms are words that have two contradictory meanings. They are really their own opposites.

I think I like Contronyms. They appeal to the rebel in me. They also may be an explanation I can fall back on when I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.

While they may be somewhat rare in the Wide World of Nyms they are not obscure words. It’s their usage that makes them unusual. For Example…

“Apology” – A statement of contrition for an action, or a defense of one.

“Dust” – To add fine particles, or to remove them.

“Left” – To Remain, or to Depart

“Bound” – Heading to a destination, or restrained from movement.

These words, literally, can have you coming and going, hither and yon, to and fro, or even this and that. 

I’m a fan of language. Without it I would have a really hard time writing this Blog. There would be a lot of blank space between the punctuation marks. It might be difficult to get my meaning across if my sentence looked like ”      “, –  ” !”

That might work if I wrote only on Monday mornings after a rough weekend and the readers had taken their vows of silence very seriously.

If I had never learned about Contronyms my life and my writing would not have changed all that much. When I am working on a Fiction Project it is usually a story with distinctively “Noirish” overtones. I try to create a shadowy mood and dialogue that is basic and to the point. Symbolism doesn’t get a lot of space on my page. I can’t imagine that my Fedora-wearing hero would be using very many Contronyms while skulking down the dark alleys down by the Waterfront. It might be a challenge though.

” I asked the night watchman if he’d seen the burglars.” He told me “I seen the men bolt.”

“Bolt I said? Was he telling me that the crooks had fled or that they were securely tied up?”

“Oh, No, Mister Detective. Bad guys left here.”

“He was at it again. They left or they were left here waiting to ambush me? What was this guy trying to do – confuse me?”

You see how using Contronyms would be an unneeded complication? If there is one thing I don’t need in my writing it is any sort of “Handicap.” 

“Handicap” – An advantage provided to ensure equality, or a disadvantage that prevents equal achievement.

 

 

 

Strangers In Our Own Land

 

Strangers In Our Own Land

You, me, and the crazy neighbors – all of us on this globe are living – trapped – by a new Draconian rule. 7.8 billion People are being told to somehow, ,avoid each other. This edict has been given the benign sounding name of “Social Distancing.” Theoretically, it is supposed to help to impede the spread of the virus that is making its way around the world. It may very well do that, but it is having another effect that may be even more toxic. That is when “Social Distancing” becomes “Social Isolation” and turns us all into strangers in our own land.

With the everpresent tentacles of the Internet more and more activities that had always been handled face to face between people have become online functions that are now done in the solitary glow of a laptop computer. With the viral pandemic erecting barriers everywhere even more of our daily meetings with real people have become impersonal and hidden behind masks. Looking in the mirror hides us from ourselves.

Things that had once been little more than luxuries have become commonplace. Supermarkets are becoming little more than warehouses as everyone places their orders online and anonymous people wearing gloves and masks drop off their orders in plastic bags outside their door.

Doctors are making diagnoses on Skype. Banks have locked their lobby doors and become online and drive-through businesses. Restaurants of all kinds are serving curbside customers only. Nobody dares to shake hands anymore. Want to give someone a hug? People will run away like you were on fire. If you need a hug – Good Luck.

“Social Distancing” is such a horrid term. There is nothing Social about it and it has absolutely nothing to do with Distance. It is all about keeping people apart, away from each other, isolating 7.8 billion people. I don’t know if we have enough room to keep everyone sufficiently isolated to please the self-anointed “experts.”

 

 

“We’re going to need a bigger boat”

 

Don’t get me wrong. I know there is a virulent virus out there – along with countless others that can be fatal. So can the Measles. So can Polio (that’s still out there, folks), and so can dining on Gas Station Sushi every night. Life can be dangerous. Let’s face it – None of us are going to get out of this thing alive. This virus that is the talk of the town is far less fatal than many other things out there. The hysteria on our TVs 24 hours a day being one of them.

“Social Distancing” creates “Social Isolation” which creates “Social Dehumanization.” The nonstop and constantly contradictory “reporting” fills up the space between the Joe Namath Medicare Insurance ads and pushes people farther apart in many ways. When this viral circus has left town there are going to be a lot of people who will have trouble readjusting to normal social behaviors. How many kids are going to believe that there is a viral boogeyman hiding under their bed at night? How many Social Misfits are being created behind their homemade masks and rubber gloves?

I for one hope that the term “Social Distancing” goes away soon and joins other linguistic hot buttons that became both familiar to us all and incredibly annoying like “Y2K” and “But Wait! There’s more!”

Symbolism

 

WE ARE NOW DEEP INTO THE AUTUMN SEASON.

It is not one of my favorites. The leaves have turned colors and are falling and everywhere are the signs of death. What blossomed in the Spring and Summer are now lying shriveled and dead on the ground.

Well, isn’t all of this a cheerful start to the day?

It’s sad, but it is a true collection of seasonal signs with only the icy cold of another Winter waiting around the corner to cover it all with snow.

I know that I am wallowing in Symbolism here, but, dang it; these things become identifiable symbols for a reason.

Our Civilization is awash with Symbols of all kinds. Every day we speak, learn, and make decisions based on a mountain of Symbols that are, in a very real way, shortcuts of accumulated information and knowledge.

I Wouldn’t Put Up With Me.

 

I DO IT BECAUSE I LIKE IT. I do it because most other people like it. I do it because it is fun.

I do it because I can.

I confuse people.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I used to be part of an Improvisational Comedy group in San Francisco. The eight of us (AKA the “Improv Alternative” and later as “Anchovi Daiquiri”) worked in nightclubs, theaters, street fairs, and any place that would let us through the door. We would do a two hour show made up entirely from audience suggestions.

Throwback Thursday from Feb. 2017 – It Seems Simple To Me

 

It Seems Simple To Me

SOME THINGS JUST DEFY EXPLANATION. Others don’t merit explanation.

“The Brightest Flash of Light Ever Recorded Now Has An Explanation.”

That’s quite a headline. I would have opted for something shorter like, “Say Cheese! Says Heaven.”

When I saw that long headline this morning I had to read what followed.

It seems that in June of 2015 a pair of Israeli Observers (Read two guys who stay up all night really looking for UFOs, but won’t admit it.) were gazing into the night skies when they saw a bright flash of light – and lucky for them, they had their GoPro cameras or iPhones turned on to record the event.  Why was I not told about this?

Jumping ahead 18 months or so to this morning the Observers say that they have finally figured out what caused it.

“…the burst was caused by the destruction of a star consumed by a black hole at the center of a distant galaxy,”

Somehow, I have my doubts about their explanation. It all seems too complicated. I think it all might have a much simpler cause.

“What did you do last night?”

“We stayed up all night staring at the sky, like most nights.”

“See anything interesting?”

“No. Just a bright flash of light.”

“Oh, what was that all about?

“I dunno. My guess was that the pizza delivery guy coming up the hill had his bright lights on.”

“That sounds reasonable to me. That was it. Mystery solved.”

“I dunno. My boss thinks it was a star being ripped apart by a black hole in a distant galaxy.”

“Hmm? I’d go for the pizza guy thing.”

“Yeah, me too.”

I make no claims to be a scientist of any sort. I was Liberal Arts major. I’m lucky I can read the label on a can of beans, but if this brightest light ever came from a “distant galaxy” – well, I have doubts that anyone can give a surefire explanation any better than, “The pizza guy had his bright lights on.”

“When a star passes within the tidal radius of a supermassive black hole, it will be torn apart. The rapid spin and high black hole mass can explain the high luminosity of this event.”

Loose translation into English: “I admit we were drinking and before I passed out my head was spinning something fierce, and then…I saw this bright light. Funny thing is I could swear I also smelled pepperoni.”

I admit that this is a very loose translation from the original “Astronomerese.”

Explaining what happens out there in the permanent night is, quite literally, a shot in the dark. The “Black Hole” idea about the bright light is as good as any I suppose, and just as valid as anything I could come up with. I like mine better. My explanation allows the guys who spend their nights gazing skyward to have a little fun – and some pizza. If we blindly accept the more scientific sounding explanation it makes me sad. Can life be any duller than spending each night sitting in the dark waiting for something, anything, to happen? It must be like being the Understudy to Life.

Reblog from The Whirly Girl – “look, they’re not extinct”

Today I have the pleasure of presenting a Reblog of a recent posting from the clever and creative mind of:

: look, they’re not extinct :

By the whirly girl

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Quite the contrary. The trusty old thesaurus ¹ is alive and well and a popular fixture on bookshelves the world over.

Sadly, the same can’t be said for Peter Roget, creator of this masterwork, he died (perished, croaked, met his maker) in 1869. A compiler, sorter, and compulsive list maker, Roget titled the 1852 edition of his classic reference book Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition.

Yikes, well, what can you say? The guy was wordy (long-winded, verbose, a gasbag). And we celebrate his yattering brilliance yet today, January 18th, known now and forevermore as Thesaurus Day. Get out the pointy party hats, my huckleberry friends, and let’s blow the roof off this dump.

Yay, words!

copyright © 2019 the whirly girl

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¹ Yes, in answer to the age-old question, there is a synonym for thesaurus: wordfinder.

NOTE: This is a revised and updated reblog from some time ago. I don’t remember exactly when and I’m too lazy to check, so we’ll never know for sure. I adore the thesaurus, though, and get trapped in its pages regularly, dashing from word to word to word for hours on end, like a hummingbird on speed. It deserves a day of glory and, as I’ve already alluded, I’m shiftless — a reblog is effortless.

171,476

 

I LOVE LANGUAGE and it use, misuse, and ability to be twisted and return to its original shape. It’s a lot like Silly Putty.

There are so many times that I hear words come flying from the mouths of relatively sane people that I have to stop and listen just to make sure that it’s not my hearing that is cuckoo. Words will go wherever we point them.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary there are 171,476 English words in current use. Most of us don’t know and use more than a tiny fraction of that total. Personally, I feel comfortable with dozens of those words.

“Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries”

 

TODAY’S POSTING IS A BIT OF A DETOUR from the usual stretch of pavement that is this blog. On most days I just write about the speed bumps in my life and my encounters with people who either fascinate, entertain, or appall me. Today I am going to talk about a book I am reading. How exciting, No? A book that really doesn’t rely on pictures, Super heroes, or the secret to quick elimination of Belly Fat. It is a book filled with and about Words. I love it.

To oversimplify it “Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries” by Kory Stamper is about how Dictionaries are written and it is not as simple as one would think. I would classify this book as a Love Letter to Language.

I’m Looking For A Good Excuse

WHY DO PEOPLE BLOG?

Why do I Blog?

The answers to these two questions are not necessarily the same. There really is no one answer I’m sure.

Some people create a Blog and post things for the world to see just so they can express their opinions to anyone and everyone who might stumble into their Blog. That’s fair. Express yourself. Of course, you must be prepared to accept the fact that, no matter what you opine, you are going to have at least half of your readers disagree with you.

Others type away online to sell something – ideas, books, cosmetics, whatever. I’m not sure if blogging is an effective way to do that. Marketing is a science and an art. I would think that a more local advertising effort would do better. However, blogging is usually free so you can’t beat the price. Also, most of us who are reading blogs are incredible cheapskates and reluctant to part with our money for anything beyond what is life sustaining.

(I guess I can honestly speak only for myself on that. Sorry. No offense meant.)

Read This Before Anyone Else

 

MY LINGUISTIC SKILLS ARE FALLING OUT OF DATE. New words are popping up all of the time and I am just not keeping current. Zounds!

This morning when I crawled down to St. Arbucks for my daily transfusion I ran headlong into a newish word that I have been seeing but not bothering to learn or adopt.

My Barista was wearing a new name tag that read, “I’m your BAE.”

BAE?

Idioms, Idiots – Something Like That

SO, THESE ARE WHAT THEY CALL THE “DOG DAYS OF SUMMER.” Never having ever been a dog I cannot personally vouch for much beyond that statement. Unlike dogs, I can and do sweat, but instead of “like a dog” I sweat like a pig. Not pretty.

At least, that is the phrase – “He sweats like a pig.” I have to take that as truth because I have not managed to ever get all that close to a pig – sweating or otherwise, and I have no plans for the future in that area. Evidently though, someone at some time did get up close and personal with a pig, a sweaty one and told people about it.

“SWEAT LIKE A PIG” – “A PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS” – “CUT THE MUSTARD” – “STRAIGHT FROM THE HORSE’S MOUTH” – “AT THE DROP OF A HAT”

These strange phrases come from somewhere. They don’t just show up in the mail.

One Thousand And Counting

FOR REASONS UNKNOWN TO ME this blog is closing in on a milestone of sorts. It won’t be long (later this year) before I will upload blog post number 1000. I have no idea how it got that far. The closest analogy I can come up with is that “Down the Hall on Your Left” is like a runaway train being run by monkeys.

There are much bigger blogs out there. I know of several that have thirty thousand followers. Numbers like that would make me dizzy. For this blog, if I count all sources, it comes  to a little under one thousand. And I’ll be honest with you – even that number surprises me. Those blogs with the huge number of followers are usually about Cooking, Make-up, or Fashion. I am certainly not in any of those categories. This blog is more about “Stuff,” and that sort of limits things. There are so many subcategories of Stuff that it’s difficult to corral those large numbers. Maybe if I started throwing in some recipes or tips on where to buy Hawaiian Shirts. Nah – that’s just not me.

Shouts And Murmurs

Fiction Saturday

One of the best playing around with the Language pieces I have ever read.

I’m

How I Met My Wife

by Jack Winter

The New Yorker, July 25, 1994 P. 82

SHOUTS AND MURMURS: a column about a man who describes meeting his wife at a party. In his description, he drops many prefixes.

It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate. I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way. I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I’d have to make bones about it, since I was travelling cognito.

Beknownst to me, the hostess, whom I could see both hide and hair of, was very proper, so it would be skin off my nose if anything bad happened. And even though I had only swerving loyalty to her, my manners couldn’t be peccable. Only toward and heard-of behavior would do. Fortunately, the embarrassment that my maculate appearance might cause was evitable. There were two ways about it, but the chances that someone as flappable as I would be ept enough to become persona grata or sung hero were slim. I was, after all, something to sneeze at, someone you could easily hold a candle to, someone who usually aroused bridled passion. So I decided not to rush it.

But then, all at once, for some apparent reason, she looked in my direction and smiled in a way that I could make heads or tails of. So, after a terminable delay, I acted with mitigated gall and made my way through the ruly crowd with strong givings. Nevertheless, since this was all new hat to me and I had no time to prepare a promptu speech, I was petuous. She responded well, and I was mayed that she considered me a savory character who was up to some good. She told me who she was. “What a perfect nomer,” I said, advertently. The conversation became more and more choate, and we spoke at length to much avail. But I was defatigable, so I had to leave at a godly hour. I asked if she wanted to come with me. To my delight, she was committal. We left the party together and have been together ever since. I have given her my love, and she has requited it.

 

It Is All In The Statistics

THERE IS AN OLD SAYING about Truth and Lies. That goes something like, “There are three kinds of deception – Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.” The clever wag that coined that must have worked for either a Government or an Internet company.

I’m not accusing anyone of telling lies! OK? I’m just saying that some things are very hard to believe – particularly in the area of Statistics.

This morning I was tiptoeing through the statistical backwater of this blog and I saw some numbers that made me stop, wipe the sleep from my eyes, and down a fresh cup of coffee.

Cornbread And Puffer Fish

SOMETIMES YOU SEE OR HEAR SOMETHING THAT JUST TICKLES YOUR RIBS and makes you laugh out loud. I’m not talking about hearing a comedian on TV, but something that comes out of somebody’s clever imagination. Something that you weren’t expecting that reaches out and hits the proverbial nail right on the head. I had one of those yesterday morning. A friend posted a comment on Facebook that hit me as so unusual, so out of literal context, but so right in its imagery that it stopped me in my tracks.

The general context was a discussion about a person’s irrational (read cuckoo) thinking about things when my friend posted this picture.

In This Sign You Shall Fluff Dry

I POPPED INTO THE NEIGHBORHOOD LAUNDROMAT the other day to take care of a few of my “nice and frilly” things when I saw a handwritten sign taped to the wall,

“Free Wi-Fi! Enjoy your time with us.”

Well, I thought that was the most sociable thing I’d ever seen in a laundromat. Most of their signs are of the “Do this” or “Don’t do that,” variety. I remember seeing a sign in a laundromat years ago that said,

“Do not put children in the dryers!”

Always sound advice I would say.

While I was waiting for my things to finish drying I overheard a woman speaking with the young lady behind the service counter. The woman had also seen the sign on the wall and had a question.

“What is this free ‘Wee-Fee’ and how do I get some?”

It Was A Dark And Stormy Night

ONE OF THE THINGS I REALLY ENJOY about doing this blog is the freedom of expression it allows me. Monday through Friday is pretty much of a Nonsense Dance. I can let my “Silly Gene” run wild. Mutations happen.

Each week I know that I can come up with about five things that can make me, and hopefully a few readers, laugh – or at least giggle.

It Seems Simple To Me

SOME THINGS JUST DEFY EXPLANATION. Others don’t merit explanation.

“The Brightest Flash of Light Ever Recorded Now Has An Explanation.”

That’s quite a headline. I would have opted for something shorter like, “Say Cheese! Says Heaven.”

When I saw that long headline this morning I had to read what followed.

What’s The Good Word?

WORDS. I’M A BIG FAN OF WORDS. I USE THEM EVERY DAY. Without words I would be speechless. The only people I know who don’t like words are Mimes – and we all know how loved they are.

(Advice: Never stand next to a Mime. You might end up as collateral damage or, even worse, you might get stuck inside that invisible box that all Mimes seem to have.)

Knock, Knock. Who’s There?

WE ARE GOING TO BE TAKING A TRIP DOWN TO TEXAS the day after tomorrow. A surprise visit. A complete surprise. Nobody in Texas knows that we are coming.

Surprise visits may be a cute idea, but I’m not so sure that it is so cute to pull a surprise like this on Dawn’s 95 year old Mother.