by James Currie and Dr. Karen Wieland
Welcome back!
In this post, we want to finish up with the contronyms, and with that, our little series on word meanings.
Recap about Janus
In the last post, we (re)introduced you to the Roman god Janus, the god of transitions, beginnings and endings. And the idea of Janus words, more commonly referred by the linguistic term of art ‘contronym’. We showed that contronyms – words that are their own opposites – come from two sources and gave an example (‘cleave’) of the first kinds.
Now, let’s look at the second way a word can develop into a contronym, the same historical word that developed two opposite or contradictory modern meanings.
The Problem with Dust
The word ‘dust’ originally meant ‘any substance rose into the air’…like dust. Not to overkill the idea, but an image: the sun streaming in through a window and you can see all the little particles drifting in the air – dust. Or when you move a long unused item and a small cloud of particles – dust – rise up into the air. And it’s through that image, the dust rising from a surface into the air, that the contronym developed.
First, to dust in ModEng means ‘to remove the dust from the surface of something’ (=subtraction). And there’s the image, as you move the rag or sweeper to remove the dust, dust is kicked up into the air (= original meaning = particles in the air).
And yet, ‘to dust’ also means ‘to sprinkle or add to something with dust or a dust like substance’ (=addition). If you’re in the kitchen, baking something, the recipe may require that you dust the work surface with flour to prevent the dough from sticking. Again, an image: as you sprinkle flour on the surface, some of the flour will rise up into the air (= original meaning).
Act Fast and Hold Fast!
As another example, let’s look at ‘fast’ in its adverbial usage (and not the noun/verb usage involving not eating for a given reason).
The ModEng word ‘fast’ is a very, very old word. It originated in PIE as *past-, meaning ‘firm, solid’. In OldEnglish, the word was ‘fæst’ and originally meant ‘firmly, securely’, in other words – not moving…at all. (Don’t worry about the ‘p’/’f’ contrast; phonetically speaking they’re kissing cousins. Think German ‘Pfennig’ and ‘Pfeiffe’ and ModEng ‘penny’ and ‘pipe’.)
And even today, ‘fast’ retains its original meaning: If something is color fast, it will not bleed and stain everything else in the washing machine (image: that red sock in with the not-white-any-more tee shirts). Or in the phrases ‘stand fast’ or ‘hold fast’, albeit a little archaic and fallen out of common usage, meaning ‘Don’t move’ or ‘Take no action.’
But (there’s always a ‘but’ with a contronym!) as we all know and love the word today, its far more common usage means ‘quickly, with great velocity”. And even as far back as OEng, fast had both meanings.
The exact derivation of this meaning is murky, at best. It may – probably – come from the Old Scandinavian languages where fast was a synonym of hard, as in to run hard, which, in addition to quantifying the effort put into running, also means ‘to run quickly’.
And Old Norse ‘drekka fast’ meant ‘to drink hard’. And it’s not a long logical leap from drinking hard (=volume) being associated with the speed of beverage intake, as it were. So the meanings linked ‘hard’ to ‘fast’ and ‘fast’ to…’fast’.
Going to Seed
Seed, as a ModEng verb, is another interesting contronym.
The noun ‘seed’ comes from a ‘core’ English word: OEng ‘sēd’ compared to ModEng ‘seed’. The verb ‘to seed’ comes a little later, but from the same OEng root. By the mid-1400s, the MidEng verb ‘sēden’ meant ‘to sow ground with seed’, an act of addition. And it still does today.
But (there it is, again!) the verb ‘to seed’ also means ‘to remove the seeds from something’, like a tomato, before chopping it up for a nice tossed salad, an act of subtraction. This second, contradictory meaning is recorded in ModEng by 1904.
Linguists can offer no clear etymology for the shift in meaning. I have my own theory, admittedly pure speculation on my part, but not an illogical speculation.
Technically, the action of removing seeds from something is ‘to deseed’. I wonder if sloppy/lazy/quick pronunciation – from ‘dee-SEED’ to a vowel reduction (‘d’Seed’) to the dropping of the prefix altogether (just plain, old ‘SEED’) – gave us the modern contronym.
The challenge is that etymologists have historically looked to the written record to trace the changes of word forms and meanings (alas, there was no TikTok or Instagram in the Middle Ages); no one will ever find the mispronounced ‘d’SEED’ in print anywhere.
Permission and Punishment
Let’s bring our discussion of contronyms full circle with a more fulsome look at the verb: ‘Sanction’.
This is a late Renaissance addition to the English language, first documented in the 1560s. Sanction comes from the past passive participle (sanctus) of the Latin verb ‘sancire’ meaning ‘to decree, confirm; to make sacred’. From ‘sanctus’ it became the noun ‘sanctio’ (‘the act of decreeing or ordaining’) and whose root ‘sanction-’ entered early Modern English as sanction, ‘a law or decree’.
Originally, like many Latin word adoptions in the Renaissance, sanction came into English through the Church, being used for ecclesiastical decrees. It wasn’t until the early 1700s that the meaning generalized (remember the earlier post about ‘generalizations’?) to cover any ‘express authoritative permission’.
The contronym meaning is logically connected to the original meaning, and, in fact, happened in the 1630s, before the expansion of the original meaning.
The logic is: if something is required by law, then the law should penalize anyone who disobeys the law. And from there (by the late 1600s), the penalty itself was also encoded in law. So the law sanctioned some action or behavior. The law then also sanctioned (decreed a penalty) for not performing said action or behavior. And we wind up with both sanctioning something and sanctioning someone for not doing the sanctioned something.
Whew.
Next on Deck
With our series on word meaning changes drawn to a self-contradictory end, it’s time to invoke Janus one more time for a transition, a new beginning. We’ll be introducing and playing with the idea of linguistic doublets. And maybe, if we’re lucky, the odd triplet or two.
References
Harper, Douglas (2021). Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved on December 12, 2023, from etymonline.com
Copyright © 2024 by James E. Currie, Jr. and Karen M. Wieland, Ph.D
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