Dusting an Unpacked Box

I hadn’t meant to follow up on my homophone post, but this week’s New Yorker has inspired me. First, let’s get our terms straight. Several commenters referred to the words I listed (peek/peak, maze/maize, census/senses, etc.) as homonyms. But although a homonym—same spelling, different meaning (bark/bark, stalk/stalk, etc.) is a type of homophone—words that sound alike but mean different things—the reverse is not necessarily so. A homonym is a subset, if you will, of a homophone; and, delving deeper, we’ll find it has its own subset, listed by some commenters as contronyms but also known as auto-antonyms, autantonyms, or contranyms: words spelled the same but with opposing meanings.

Whatever you call them, contronyms are fun to list and to research. How is it, for instance, that sanction came to mean both reward and punishment? It derives from the Latin sanctio, for law or ordinance, which itself comes from the notion of sacredness or consecration. Over time, once law might be wielded to punish a transgressor, so might it be used to reward those obedient to it. OK, that’s reasonable. But what about cleave (to hold fast to) and cleave (to sunder)? There you find two different Germanic roots, klîban (to adhere) and chlioban or gleubh- (to cut with a knife). Fast (tightly held) and fast (quick) have the same root and the same sense, of immediacy and firmness, holding their opposing meanings in tension. Ravel’s meaning of both entangling and disentangling, with its consequently confused antonym unravel, seems to have taken two opposing directions almost at once, perhaps because any word whose origin means “confused” is bound to have a set of confused meanings.

Many contronyms derive their antonymic meanings from differing ideas about prefixes—so we have impregnable meaning “stoutly defended” or “able to be impregnated,” depending on your interpretation of im-; oversight as “supervision” or “something missed” depending on over-; unpacked putting the contents of a box in or out of the box depending on how we read un-. Likewise, shelled has opposing meanings depending on whether it can or cannot be used as part of a verb. (If we’ve shelled the turtle and it’s been shelled, it has no shell; if it’s a shelled turtle, and no one has shelled it, it has a shell.) The title of this post could mean that we’re removing the dust from an empty box, sprinkling powder over a box still full of things, or some other combination of action and object.

Other contronyms bear the marks of the sort of language shift that has us saying “I could care less” for “I couldn’t care less”: nonplussed, for instance, or moot. Which brings me to my inspiration for this post. As Hendrik Hertzberg points out, what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “semantic infiltration” has led to a contronymic sense of the word entitled. Although the word appears at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence (“… to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them”) it appears only rarely until the mid-20^th century, when programs once called “social insurance” established themselves under federal law as benefits earned by their recipients. But with conservatives putting the word into quotes and developing what Robert Nozick called “an entitlement theory of justice,” the word came gradually to mean benefits assigned through redistributive taxation and given to people who have not earned or “deserved” them: “In other words, what no one is entitled to is, precisely, ‘entitlements.’”

There’s no stopping the contronym train once it gets up a head of steam, of course—just try correcting someone who is delighted to offer “fulsome praise.” Instead, the word becomes a sort of Kryptonite, a reminder of once-hospitable origins that has now become radioactive. As Hertzberg points out, in his Inaugural Address in January, Barack Obama did not let the word entitlement pass his lips, lest it be hurled back at him in contronymic fury.