Contraband synonym
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.