A buddy wrote me an interesting question (to which I did not have an answer):
It's been driving me crazy, is there a term of art for when the etymological root of a word is the opposite of the word's modern meaning? For example, asbestos means "an unquenchable fire"; philander means "a lover of men" etc. Cheers, A.,
Anyone know this?
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5 comments:
Maybe diachronic autantonymy?
Excellent, I'd never heard the term autantonym beflore, but of course, there's a Wiki page on it here.
I don't know the term, but the semantic process by which it happens, which is what you might be thinking of, is called pejoration.
I like "diachronic autantonymy", though I'd be inclined to go with the equivalent "diachronic auto-antonymy" because I find it a little clearer. For what it's worth, I wrote about auto-antonyms a few months ago.
mettle, thanks for the hint, pejoration is useful here.
Stan, interesting post.I was not familiar with the term chuffed and to my ears, I would have assumed it had a negative connotation.
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