30 January 2017

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.

23 January 2017

Book Titles

In our continuing series of posts about where titles of books and other works originated, we add these book titles.

The novel about colonialism in Africa,Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, takes its title from a W.B. Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming.” to name his story about colonialism, pride, and loss:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...”

Flannery O’Connor's short story collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge  borrows from the book Omega Point by the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

“Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.


Evelyn Waugh turned to T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland” for his book A Handful of Dust.

“I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

John Steinbeck often turned to the Bible for titles. His Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath  sounds like it might be Biblical. After several other working titles, his wife suggested a phrase from the song “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” by Julia Ward Howe.

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.”


16 January 2017

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.