Contronyms

You can seed a field by putting seeds into the soil, but you can also seed a watermelon by taking seeds out of it.  "Fast" can mean "moving quickly" (as in "running fast") or it can mean "not moving" (as in "stuck fast"). How can that be?

Words that have one meaning but also have an opposite meaning are known as contronyms.

What I would consider to be true contronyms are also homographs - distinct words with different etymology which happen to have the same form. One word like that is cleave. It means "to separate" which comes from Old English clēofan. That is where we get the noun cleaver, a tool with a heavy broad blade used by butchers for chopping meat.  But cleave also means the opposite, "to adhere"which is also from Old English clifian.

You might also see the terms "autantonym" used for these types of words. That term was coined by Joseph T. Shipley in 1960, but in 1962 Jack Herring labeled them contronyms and that word is most frequently used.

Other examples:
sanction  can mean to permit and also to penalize
bolt (which originally came from crossbows) means to leave quickly and also fixed. It can mean "moving rapidly" or "unmoving."
buckle can mean "fasten securely" as in "buckle your seat belt", or it can mean "fall apart" as in "buckle under pressure."

Some contronyms are because of national varieties of English. "To table a bill" in the U.K. and Canada means "to put it up for debate."  But in American English it means the opposite, "to remove it from debate." The more logical British version comes from placing an actual bill on the table of Parliamentarians to be considered and debated.

Some contronyms have fallen out of usage. At one time, "awful" meant full of awe or awe-inspiring, but now it only means terrible.

An apocryphal story relates how Charles II (or sometimes Queen Anne) described St Paul's Cathedral as "awful, pompous, and artificial", meaning in modern English "awe-inspiring, majestic, and ingeniously designed."

Contronyms are not unique to English. For example, in French, hôte may mean either "host" or "guest."  

In Hawaiian, aloha  (which essentially means "love") is translated both as “hello” and "goodbye” depending on the context.

Evian

This post is about what is NOT the origin of a name.

Evian water (French pronunciation ​evjɑ̃) is a brand of mineral water. Many people have noticed that the name is naive spelled backwards. The idea that comes along with that reversal is that this fancy bottled water and that the joke is on those naive consumers willing to pay a premium price for water.

But that is not true.

Evian is owned by Danone, a French multinational corporation that sells the mineral water and also a line of organic skin care products and a luxury resort in France under that name.

The origin goes back to 1789 when the Marquis of Lessert drank some water from the Sainte Catherine spring on the land of a M. Cachat. The marquis had been suffering from kidney and liver problems, but claimed that the water cured his ailments.

Still sold in glass bottles too

In 1859, it became a business, and in 1878 the French Ministry of Health actually authorized the bottling of "Cachat water" because of a recommendation by the Medicine Academy.

The water sold as Evian comes from several sources near Évian-les-Bains, on the south shore of Lake Geneva and was first sold in glass bottles in 1878.

In 1969, it started to be sold in plastic (PVC) bottles and it was introduced in 1978 to the U.S. market. In 1995, Evian switched to collapsible PET bottles, though it is still available in glass bottles too.

gist

GIST is an odd little word that I have heard used my entire life and never known the origin. People say "What was the gist of it?" meaning what was the essence or essential part of a matter In law, it has a more specific meaning, the real point of an action, as in "damages are the gist of the lawsuit."

The word appeared in the early 18th century and comes from Old French, gesir  "to lie" and earlier from Latin jacere.  The legal connection seems important as there was (is?) an old legal phrase cest action gist  that was used in France and England meaning "this action lies." That phrase denoted that there were sufficient grounds to proceed. "Lie" here means more like the way we use it today when we say "The difficulty lies in getting sufficient funds."

I came to all of this when I was writing about memory. There is a kind of false memory that is sometimes called "gist memory." Gist traces are fuzzy representations of a past event when we have the general idea but not the specifics of the event clear. Verbatim traces are detailed representations of a past event. It seems that although people are capable of processing both verbatim and gist information, they oddly prefer to reason with gist traces rather than verbatim.

The older I get, the more I seem to be relying on gist memories  if I remember something at all!

plaque

A nice plaque for Mickey at the Hall of Fame

I saw this Tweet by comedian Jim Gaffigan,

and it got me wondering
in the way that usually generates ideas for posts on this blog.

 PLAQUE - that gunk on teeth and also those things we win and never know what to do with - (and not to be confused with the disease "plague" - an unfortunate misspelling I often saw with my students) is an odd word for its two very diverse meanings.

Dental plaque is a biofilm of bacteria that grows on surfaces within the mouth. It is sticky and colorless at first, but later it forms tartar and is an even grosser brown or pale yellow. It gets all over teeth and when it gets along or below the gumline, you have bigger problems.

A commemorative plaque is certainly nicer than that stuff on your teeth. You can stick it to a wall, although if you get a lot of them, you can stick them in a drawer.

What's the connection? Even Wikipedia didn't try to answer that for either plaque. But some etymological digging told me that the word in those uses comes from mid-19th century from French, where it arrived via the Dutch noun plak meaning "tablet" which in turn came from the Dutch verb plakken meaning "to stick."

I guess the dental gunk refers to the verb and the way it sticks to your teeth, while the award is a tablet (though you do stick it on a wall or in a drawer).

I tried, but failed, to find a plaque that commemorates plaque, but it probably wouldn't cost much to have one made. You might want to give it to your dental hygienist next time you get a good cleaning.

The dental variety

Meme

A meme (AKA Internet meme) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. Nowadays, these tend to spread via the Internet and particularly through social networks such as Facebook or Twitter.

Memes are seen as cultural analogues to genes because they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to outside forces.

The word meme is a shortening (modeled on gene) of mimeme from Ancient Greek meaning "imitated thing." It was coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene well before the Internet. Dawkins gives examples of memes from catchphrases, fashion, and technology.

Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance.

Memes that propagate less prolifically become extinct. Others survive, spread, and sometimes evolve or mutate.

Memes existed before we had that word to attach to them. I wrote here earlier about the phrase "Kilroy was here" which was a popular, viral meme that appeared during and after World War II.

Looking at memes popular in the online culture in 2106, we find a lot of lightweight items.

As Andy Warhol predicted about the more and more frequent "15 minutes of fame" we would see in culture, someone such as Ken Bone became a meme very briefly during the second Clinton/Trump Presidential Debate.  Bone, an undecided voter tapped by Gallup, asked the candidates an earnest, straightforward question about energy policy and quickly became a meme more due to his old-fashioned look and a red sweater that sold out within a matter of hours and became a popular Halloween costume.

“Me at the beginning of 2016 vs me at the end of 2016” was popular photo meme in 2016. But, unfortunately, what Dawkins meant as a serious kind of cultural evolution seems to indicate that our evolution is a mimetic devolution into triviality and pop fluff.