
Words That Are Their Own Opposites (2015) - artsandsci
https://mentalfloss.com/article/57032/25-words-are-their-own-opposites
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calebm
I ran into "The payment was remitted" at work, and I wasn't sure initially if
they said they were denying to reimburse me, or if it the payment had been
sent out.

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injb
Weirdly, the verb "to doubt" used to be used in the opposite sense to how it
is now. So, for instance, if you say "I doubt it's going to rain", that means
you think it won't rain. But a few hundred years ago, it would have meant you
think it _is_ going to rain. (And of course if you lived in England, you'd
probably have been right.)

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edzillion
If you've read Gibbon's The Decline and the Fall of the Roman Empire you will
have wondered at the meaning of both sensible and insensible which both seem
to alternate between opposites randomly throughout the book.

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kranner
If we take archaic usage into account, there are many more words that now mean
the opposite of what they used to mean, e.g. “awesome”.

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injb
When was awesome used to mean bad?

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vbuwivbiu
they mean that since _everything_ is awesome these days, awesome now means
"ordinary"

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kranner
I didn't meant that at all.

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mrcactu5
these are called "Janus words" or self-antonyms. Such as "flammable" and
"inflammable".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-
antonym](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym)

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velcrovan
Buckle — to collapse, or to fasten

Raze/Raise might be a “phonetic contranym”

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rolph
im wondering how an AI would deal with this sort of thing. would contronym
strings, be like forbidden ASCII?

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rfugger
Inflammable?

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_nalply
That's a dangerous one. The builder asks, is this insulation inflammable?

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murkle
Reciprocal

