Subject: words that are their own opposites ( part 2 )

in my last summary ( linguist 6 . 74 ) i listed a collection of what i call auto-antonyms - - words that have two opposite meanings . for example , to " clip " may mean to cut a little piece off , or to put a little piece on . to " look over " may mean careful scrutiny or that you missed an important detail . sometimes the antonymy may be historical : " nice " used to denote an unpleasant quality . in that summary , i promised a discussion of whether any generalities could be made about such pairs . are they regularly motivated , or always a coincidence ? i ' m still editing the responses to that question . meanwhile , here are more auto-antonyms that got left out of last post : one auto-antonym that i seem to have overlooked in preparing my post , although i remember looking it over many times before , is " moot " , which at once means " suitable for debate " and " not worth discussing " . impregnable : able to impregnated or inable to be pregnated , as joel hoffman points out . cope ( s ) mate : used to mean antagonist and now means partner or comerade , says ariadna solovyova , who got the word off of anu garg 's a . word . a . day mailing list . it turns out that they were having a week celebrating " fence-setters " , evidently another term for what i ' ve been calling auto-antonyms . bruce nevin reminds us of an intercontinental auto-antonym pair : " public school " in britain is " private school " in the usa and vice versa . infer : historically ( and now , informally ) this means " imply " as well . rent , lease : several pointed out to me that these means both lend and borrow . in addition , dan myers wrote to tell me that chinese operates similarly with respect to this pair , and wolfgang lipp notes a similar auto-antonymy to represent " give " and " take " in pronunciation ( shou4 ) but not in writing . learn / teach : in " sub " - standard english , these two meanings fuse into " learn " , as they do in standard russian " uchit ' " here are some of my personal favorites that i left out of the first summary : sensitive : this may describe either someone with profound understanding for the feelings of others , and tolerates differences of opinion ( thus " sensitivity training " for group leaders ) as well as a paranoid who does n't listen to what people are really saying , and decides to take everything as a personal insult . hole / whole : spelled the first way , an entire absence of matter ; the second , entire presence . this reminds me of " pit " which can be either a hollow or the stone of a fruit . which reminds me of " seeded " oranges ( insert your favorite fuit here ) - - oranges with seeds ( as opposed to navel oranges , which have no seeds ) , or oranges that have had their seeds removed . if you think you ' re beginning to see some patterns here , you ' re not alone ! as i said , i ' ve received a few theories on the ultimate essence of auto-antonymy , historical , psychological , and sociological approaches . these theories show that auto-antonymy comes about for a variety of reasons . in a short while , i ' m going to put up a summary of these theories . then , i ' ll briefly cover related linguistic phenomena , such as words with synonyms that look suspiciously like antonyms : flammable / inflammable , ravel / unravel . oh , and by the way , it turns out i was not the first to come up with the term " auto-antonym . " dennis baron informs me that he used the term " autoantonymy " on page 73 of his 1989 book / declining grammar and other essays on the english vocabulary / . - - alex eulenberg ( aeulenbe @ indiana . edu ) - - indiana university
