These Extremely Cool Words Mean the Opposite of Themselves
All about the delightful phenomenon of "Janus Words"
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They’re called contronyms, antagonyms, auto-antonyms (shudder), and enantiodromes (fun!), but by far the nicest thing they’re called is “Janus Words,” after the (literally) two-faced Roman god Janus, who presided over doorways, gates, and transitions, looking backwards and forwards at the same time — just one of the many gnarly things you can do when you have two faces. Janus Words are words that contain their own negation, which is to say that they are synonyms for their own antonym, which is not really very helpful at all, so I’ll provide a few examples.
The Janus Word that’s cited most frequently is cleave, which can mean both “cling to” and “rend asunder.” You see the former sense in this passage from Genesis about the first man ever to exist being immediately too clingy with a girl he just met:
“Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”
And you can see the opposite meaning in Shakespeare’s “He would drown the stage with tears, and cleave the general ear with horrid speech” — which is Hamlet being rather too hard on himself, as usual.
While many Janus Words have come by their opposing meanings through the natural wear and tear of language use, cleave is actually two different words that are spelled the same (a homograph). The first comes from the Old English word clifian, meaning “to adhere,” and the second comes from cleofan, meaning “to split.” Clip is also two words hiding in one body, with the sense that means “cut” (as in “Hamlet’s really clipping his own wings with all this negativity”) coming from an onomatopoeic Scandinavian word for sheep-shearing, and the sense that means “adhere” coming from a root that means “embrace” and also gives us “clasp.”
But a lot of the most entertaining Janus Words are words that just can’t seem to decide what they want to be when they grow up. Hew means the same thing as cleave in both senses — one can hew something apart with an ax, but one can also hew to something (as in “Adam hewed closely to his belief that he should cleave to the first woman who was nice to him”). In this case, the second, contradictory, sense of the word developed out of a figurative phrase — “hew to the line,” meaning to cut evenly with a saw.
Some other cheekily fun Janus Words are scan, which means both “to glance at briefly” and “to search in depth”; sanction, which can mean “to condone” and “to punish”; and oversight, which can mean both “watching carefully” and “carelessly omitting.” Fast means “fixed firmly in place” as well as “moving quickly”; trip (in a poetic usage like Milton’s “Trip the light fantastic”) can mean “to move nimbly and quickly” as well as “to stumble”; and fix can be both “a problem” and “a solution.”
Another category of words that might be described as Janus-like or (less pleasantly) contronymous are words whose appearance contradicts their meaning. David Foster Wallace used to keep a collection of these words, which he presented to his undergraduate students at Pomona in the form of the following quiz:
WIN A LUNCH WITH DAVE, SPARKLING CONVERSATIONALIST, WELL-MANNERED EATER, BY SIMPLY IDENTIFYING WHAT ALL THE FOLLOWING WORDS HAVE IN COMMON:
Foreign | Big | Diminutive | Incomprehensible | Untyped | Pulchritude
S-less | Unwritten | Indefinable | Misspelled | Vulgar | High-class | Invisible
Unvowelled | Obscene
Some of these are subjective — is “Pulchritude” really such an ugly word? But there’s something rather captivating about the idea of words that unwittingly contradict themselves not through a secondary meaning but by their very nature as words on a page.
I’ve made you a puzzle. The puzzle image is below if you want to print it out like our forebears used to, but you can also fill it in with a click! (The solution is explained and annotated here.)
