Speaking of that last pair, how can two words that seem to mean the opposite actually mean the same? In- as a prefix should mean “not” (see blog of 12/26/09), but here it doesn’t. Why not? It gets to etymology again. Word-detective.com addresses the inflammable/flammable confusion:
In the beginning, there was "inflammable," a perfectly nice English word based on the Latin "inflammare," meaning "to kindle," from "in" (in) plus "flamma" (flame). "Inflammable" became standard English in the 16th century. So far, so good.
Comes the 19th century, and some well-meaning soul dreamt up the word "flammable," basing it on a slightly different Latin word, flammare, meaning "to set on fire." There was nothing terribly wrong with "flammable," but it never really caught on. After all, we already had "inflammable," so "flammable" pretty much died out in the 1800's.
"But wait," you say, "I saw 'flammable' just the other day." Indeed you did. "Flammable" came back, one of the few successful instances of social engineering of language….
After World War Two, safety officials on both sides of the Atlantic decided that folks were too likely to see "inflammable" and decide that the word meant "fireproof," so various agencies set about encouraging the revival of "flammable" as a substitute. The campaign seems to have worked, and "inflammable" has all but disappeared.
That left what to call something that was not likely to burst into flames, but here the process of linguistic renovation was easier. "Non-flammable" is a nice, comforting word, and besides, it's far easier on the tongue than its now thankfully obsolete precursor, "non-inflammable."
Other words with both similarities and differences are homophones. Homophones are words that sound alike but have different meanings (like male and mail). Rarely do pairs of homophones have opposite meanings (antonymns). One example of homophones with opposite meanings is raise (to build or rise) and raze (to demolish or push down by force).
The antonyms cleave (to split apart) and cleave (to adhere, or stick together) are homographs (the same spelling) as well as homophones. The words patronize (to support) and patronize (to act condescendingly toward) are also antonym homograph homophones.
This isn’t as unusual as you may think. There are a few English words that have one meaning that is the opposite of another. Wikipedia calls these “ ‘self-antonyms’, ‘auto-antonyms’ or ‘contronyms’. Examples include cleave or clip (joining things together or taking them apart), fast (move quickly or fix in one spot), sanction (to give one's blessing or one's condemnation), enjoin (to cause something to be done, to forbid something from being done), and ravel (to unravel, to entangle).”
And in the category of “I never noticed that” is the differing spelling of the words blond and blonde. I always spell it blonde, but it turns out that blonde used to be used only in describing women, while blond was used for males. It is common in some languages to decline adjectives, but this is the last remaining adjective in English that has vestiges of declination, and those are growing less as blond is becoming the preferred (some say politically correct) usage for both male and female. Or is it mail and femail?
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