Wednesday 28 December 2016

More 3-year-old Groverisms

Found these in my Facebook memories from when Grover was 3:

Grover: Why did your alarm go off?
Me: Because it's 8 o'clock.
Grover: But it went ON, not off!


Me: You're a weirdo.
Grover: No, I'm a nice-o.


Opposite links

Paul Anthony Jones has a nice post on Mental Floss of "Words and phrases you didn't know had opposites"

A friend from my job in Texas has been 'cultivating the opposite' for the past year. Here's her reflection on it

the opposite of 'cry'


 From 'Bottom' with Rik Mayall and Ade Edmonson:

        Eddie:       ...Cry did you?
        War veteran: Quite the opposite actually.
        Eddie:       What? You sucked water in through your eyes?

Happy for deep people

Sally Sparrow: I love old things. They make me feel sad.
Kathy Nightingale: What's good about sad?
Sally Sparrow: It's happy for deep people.
—'Blink', Doctor Who (2007)

'Downhill' as auto-antonym

Anne Curzan in the Lingua Franca blog,  'It's all downhill from here':
"A friend of mine’s daughter spotted a (semi-) auto-antonym — a word that has two opposing meanings — that was not on my radar: downhill. As she pointed out, the word can be positive when we use it metaphorically to refer to something getting easier from this point forward, and it can be very not positive when we use it metaphorically to refer to something (or everything!) getting worse from this point forward. It’s clearly not a perfect auto-antonym in that the meanings are not exactly semantic opposites (easier vs. worse), but it’s not outside the ballpark."

Monday 19 December 2016

You know me and you don't: Chanel advertising

Perfume ads are the bane of the Christmas season. So much style, so little substance. So much self-importance, so little consequence.

Simon Koppel kindly pointed this one out to me. Do the contrasts say "Here's a perfume for any occasion?" or do they just cancel each other out and say "I am nothing"?