7 Words That, to Everyone’s Great Surprise, Have Opposites!

Absolutely staggered to learn that the opposite of Anonymous is … Onymous.

No puzzle from me this time because daycare keeps finding creative new reasons to send my children home during the week, but here’s a lovely one from widdersbel on MyCrossword. My crash course on how to do cryptic puzzles begins here.

The metaphor I want to use here is, like, when that one person at work you were certain was single shows up at the Holiday party with their wife of 15 years. Or maybe more fun is when you learn that a famous book (say, Paradise Lost, Huckleberry Finn, or Little Women) has a surprise sequel that’s been hiding in plain sight (they all do, of course — Paradise Regained, Tom Sawyer Abroad, and Little Men, respectively). Or (I like to do these things in threes for propriety’s sake) when you discover that a song you’ve known for years (Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn, for instance) is secretly a cover. For anyone still following me, what I’m saying is that there are three types of words — words that have antonyms, words that don’t have antonyms, and words that seem like they definitely don’t have antonyms, but secretly do! Here are a few good ones.

For everyone who gets a thrill of excitement whenever they learn that a meeting (or a date, or, honestly, any engagement) has been postponed, this word is your nightmare. Prepone, which means “to move something to an earlier time” is a common usage among India’s large English-speaking population, and it’s seen in English as early as 1500 to mean “setting [an object] in front of” — as opposed the modern usage of moving a meeting to an earlier time, which (as we all know) is wicked and obscene. 

Left-handed people may not be aware that the word Ambidextrous is a slander. Its meaning is “able to use both hands equally well,” but its etymology (ambi - “both” + dexter - “right”) is literally “right-handed on both sides.” To make matters worse, Ambidextrous has a cloddish, bumbling twin sister that the family never talks about named Ambilevous, which means “clumsy” — or, literally, “left-handed on both sides.” Ambilevous occurs in English as early as 1640, when it was derived by analogy with the Greek word ἀμφαρίστερος, meaning “having two left hands.” Here’s Thomas Browne in 1650, being terribly insensitive to the left-handed people of the world:  

Again, Some are Ἀμφαριστεροὶ as Galen hath expressed; that is, ambilevous or left-handed on both sides; such as with agility and vigour have not the use of either: who are not gymnastically strong or fit for corporal exercise. 

If we lived in a fairer world, Anonymous would be defined as “not Onymous,” but in fact it’s precisely the other way around, because Anonymous got here first. Onymous, meaning “explicitly named” (via back-formation) gets used as early as 1775, but usually as a specific contrast to someone who is Anonymous — or possibly as a rebuke to someone who is Polyonymous, which sounds, frankly, exhausting. 

Jamais Vu — the opposite of Déja Vu — means “experiencing something familiar as if for the first time” and it’s sometimes connected to “semantic satiation,” when a familiar word starts to seem strange after multiple repetitions. The Vu family have another sibling, Presque Vu, which is when something’s on the tip of your tongue — what James Joyce memorably calls “almosting it.” 

Gruntled — in the sense meaning “cheerful” — is a humorous back-formation from Disgruntled dating to the early 1900s, and it feels like the sort of thing that P.G. Wodehouse would have a lot of fun with, which (of course) he does, when Bertie says of the disapproving Jeeves in Code of the Woosters: 

He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled. 

But Gruntle has been around much longer than that in English. It appears as early as 1400 meaning “to utter a low grunt” as an animal might, and in the late 1500s to mean “to grumble or complain.” The “Dis-” suffix was later added as an intensifier rather than a negation (this sometimes happens with “Dis-” and it’s always confusing), which means that Gruntle is one of those fun words that has ended up meaning exactly the opposite of what it wanted to when it started out. 

Maculate (an adjective meaning “spotted or tarnished”) is, as far as I can tell, no back-formation. This one’s mainlined straight from the Latin and it turns up as early as 1490, alongside an even rarer verbal form meaning “to spoil” — as in “You maculated my morning when you preponed that meeting” — and an absolutely bonkers noun form meaning “a blemish” — as in “I’d be considerably more gruntled if I weren’t covered in maculates.” If you ask me, the Medievals went rather too far with this word. Small doses, guys. 

Cacography means “bad handwriting” or, if you’re feeling obtuse, “maculate handwriting.” It’s the sort of thing you just have to put up with when you’re hopelessly ambilevous. 

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I’ll have a brand-new puzzle for you next week (I’m trying to calibrate this next one a little bit easier than the last few), but if you’re in a puzzling mood, enjoy this nice one from widdersbel or — for an easy mini-puzzle — the latest from The New Yorker.