9/10/2023 0 Comments Contraband synonym(“Awful,” né awe-full, went in an analogous direction but died in a different way.) Likewise, “amazing” and “totally.” “Awesome” strikes me as an all but unusable word, except in irony, now that we live in a world in which you might plausibly hear an oatmeal cookie or a shoelace described as awesome. Words also can become unusable, paradoxically, through excessive usefulness-overuse. I’m not sure the soignée ghost of Miss Wharton, though, floating about in her monogrammed sheets, regards the trend of our language with the same imperturbability. Poor, crippled Ethan-the epitome of patience and interminable suffering-no doubt shoulders this latest indignity with mute forbearance after all, as his example tells us, life is a process of steadily accumulating burdens. Not long ago, teaching a course in the novella to undergrads, I was apparently the only one in the classroom who felt there was anything odd or untoward when a shy, soft-spoken sophomore raised her hand to offer this assessment of Edith Wharton’s put-upon and pitiable hero Ethan Frome: “I think Ethan’s a total asshole.” Though the seventies, when I was in college, are recalled as a freewheeling and iconoclastic era, back then “asshole” wouldn’t have been deemed an acceptable lit-crit characterization. On the other hand, a cluster of earthy terms that used to be unusable, at least in civil discourse, has gained acceptability, especially among the young. Though “niggard” and “niggardly” have a rich pedigree running through Chaucer and Shakespeare and Browning, they’ve recently fallen out of currency as the result of being near-homonyms to a hateful epithet. Words become unusable for all sorts of reasons. Unusable? I suppose it might find usefulness through its cover-your-tracks slipperiness: “My daughter’s new boyfriend, Freddy, has a depthless mind.” The beauty of “depthless,” it occurred to me, is its utter reversibility. Something similar arises in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “ Crusoe in England,” with its pun on Mount Despair/Mont d’espoir.)īut most of these tricky little double-talkers manage, through surrounding context or attendant preposition, to fix unambiguously which polar meaning they intend. (There’s a special appealing subclass of auto-antonyms that exists only when spoken, as in raze/raise a building or-if muddily enunciated-prescribed/proscribed drugs. A lengthy, but not exhaustive, list of auto-antonyms can be found on Wikipedia. I don’t know how many auto-antonyms English offers, but the list includes “cleave” (unify or sever-the butcher’s wife cleaves to the butcher, who cleaves the cow’s carcass), “overlook” (oversee or fail to notice), “let” (allow or, as in the legal phrase “let or hindrance,” obstruct), “enjoin” (encourage or prohibit), and “sanction,” as in any sanctioned imports are either approved goods or contraband.
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