Etymology from Memory, #6

Autoantonymy

Antonyms, of course, are pairs of words that have meanings opposite to each other. Autoantonyms, in turn, are single words that themselves can mean either one thing or its opposite. This can happen either by convergence --e.g., the English verb 'to cleave' comes from two separate but similar Anglo-Saxon verbs, and today can mean either 'to separate' or 'to latch on'-- or it can happen through a cleavage, so to speak, within a single lexical item-- thus 'to dust' means either to remove the dust from something or to cover something, perhaps that very thing, with dust or a dust-like substance. You might think that autoantonyms of the latter sort are rare birds in the dictionary, but in fact they are all over the place, particularly when the opposition between motion and rest is in question. Thus the adjective 'fast' means both 'swift with respect to motion' and 'bolted down', i.e., 'motionless'. A little reflection will also convince you that most prepositions are capable of autoantonymy. This in fact may have happened to you already: when confronted by a well-intentioned fund-raiser in the street, who tells you that she is raising money 'for breast cancer', does a little part of you not wish to reply: 'Sorry, no, I'm against breast cancer'?

Autoantonymy seems, in fact, to be the inherent tendency of words. Spinoza said that every determination is a negation, and to this extent the very use of a determinate word with a determinate meaning requires that one also implicitly say: this is not that. But to say what something is not is already to mention that other thing, and so to associate the thing you are mentioning with its opposite. This, I think, is the genealogy of autoantonyms.

Boris Gasparov, from whom I learned Old Church Slavonic, once observed that autoantonyms were also significant in comparative linguistics. Thus he noted that the German word for 'sky' or 'heaven', Himmel, is etymologically connected to the Russian word for 'earth', zemlya. What could be more separate than heaven and earth? Not the words for them in German and Russian, respectively, evidently. When a Russian says 'earth', a German hears, or perhaps thinks he hears, distantly, vaguely: 'not-sky'.

There is one autoantonym that might arguably be said to ground the social existence of Indo-Europeans and of all those who speak Indo-European languages, namely, the paired terms 'guest' and 'host'. Both of these, if I recall correctly, can be traced back to a hypothetical Proto-Indo-European term, ghosti, which described either the guest or the host in any given guest-host relationship (this is also, of course the source of 'ghost', which leads one to wonder what sort of relationship one ought to have to the supernatural spirits one purportedly finds in, let us say, a newly purchased Victorian: are they guests to be accommodated, or are they the hosts who lay down the house rules?). What is really remarkable about guest/host is that it is doubly autoantonymous: the guest and the host occupy two opposite, complementary positions in the core social relationship of Indo-European speakers, and at the same time both the guest and the host are hostile to the hostes, that is, to the enemies.

So the guest and the host are each other's opposites, but the two of them together are both the opposite of the guys they are trying to keep away: the hostile enemies. Yet they all are denoted by one version or other of the same word. Every determination is at the same time a negation, but by the same token every concept contains its opposite, if only implicitly. Autoantonymy occurs when this containment becomes something more than implicit. Yet one might conjecture that it is the general condition of words that they have their meaning only to the extent that they threaten to mean their opposite.

Comments

[Abbas Raza]

You really should be given Safire's column.

[David Ker Thomson]

"Leave and cleave" was the watchword for our sexual coming of age as Christian fundamentalist boys, which meant to leave parents and cleave to your wife. I mean, not YOUR wife per se. And not wives in general. One's one wife. The "leave and cleave" phrase, if it was even spelled that way, perhaps licensed more startling images than it suppressed. Trust Smith to know that a certain apparently random cluster of misunderstandings is actually a category and it is has a funny but not uninteresting name. Keep it coming.

[Alon Levy]

When I started reading this post, I only could think of "to moot" - I didn't really think of the other words.

The guest/hostile alternation is not unusual as a case of semantic drift. There are a lot of other near-antonymous cognates, usually coming from some case of specialization or generalization, or just general drift. For example, in Greek and Latin, *yer specialized from year to season, and eventually to hour; in Germanic languages, it kept its original meaning. Color and color-related terms are very unstable, creating cognates like black, blue, blaze, flavio, flagration, all coming from *bhel, which meant to burn or to shine.

[Guido Baldoni]

In italian, "ospite" means both "guest" and "host". This always puzzled me.

[Chris Boyd]

Always found something beautiful in the Spanish why and because:

¿por qué? porque

[Ted]

"sanctions" -- prohibitions against doing something
"sanction" -- to permit or allow something

"oversight" -- responsibility for, jurisdiction over something
"oversight" -- a mistake, a failure to be responsible for something

[Neillie]

I’m listening to some bad hip hop right now. The lyrics are ill. But the beat is bad, and the loop is bad. Really, it’s just a bad record altogether.

[Josh P]

As a variation, how about antonymic homonyms such as raise/raze? I remember a high school conversation with a friend about such words, but all I can come up with is the raise/raze pairing.

[ilya]

учить in Russian means both "to teach" and "to learn".

[Karl Steel]

Thanks for this? You know Derrida's meditation on the host autoantonym? I write about it a bit here. Here's the bit you might find useful:

We can understand the import of what occurs here through Derrida's lecture notes for the session that opened his course on “Hostipitalité,” or, as Gil Anidjar straightforwardly translates the word, “hostipitality.” As elsewhere in his oeuvre, Derrida forms a neologism that expresses his argument in miniature. “Hostipitality” incorporates the double meaning of the French “hôte,” which means both “guest” and “host.” As Derrida argues, a host who welcomes a guest in a limited sense—for a limited time, with a limited set of accommodations, and for a guest whose character, desires, and needs are already known in advance—has not been truly hospitable, because the host has measured the hospitality. A truly welcoming host must offer hospitality without limits, which requires that the host be overcome by an unexpected guest with unexpected wants. Thus the true host is unable to welcome, because to welcome means to decide when and how far to open the door. Nor can the true host know the character of the guest in advance, because this, too, reserves to the host the option of denying hospitality. By welcoming, the host risks being caught up entirely by the demands of the guest, even becoming hostage to the guest: hence the ethical and logical affinity of the opposing meanings of “hôte.” Hence too the presence of the Latin root “hostis,” meaning both “stranger” and “enemy”: the arrival of the guest “ruptures, bursts in or breaks in” upon the host, shattering the host's sense of home, boundaries, and, ultimately, self, since the true host reserves nothing to itself.