Dinosaur comics are the most antonymous comics

On the difference between 'same but for one difference' and 'different but for one similarity'.

Original source: http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=3230

Dinosaur Comics does my dissertation

So, as part of my PhD research I asked people questions like "what's the opposite of grass?" and things like that.

So, basically, Dinosaur Comics is replicating my doctoral research--and comes to pretty much the same conclusion. (click to enlarge)

Not open because we're closed

Via the Poke, with more examples there.

Raises a semantic question: is 'not-open' necessarily the same as 'closed'? Probably, but it's a distraction to think of other possible states...

At the oxymoron museum

A lovely little cartoon by Wrong Hands gives a map of the Oxymoron Museum.

not quite a Janus word, but almost...

Make the word 'boring' exciting by simply removing the 'r'.

— Moose Allain (@MooseAllain) 25 April 2017

The best of times, the worst of times

(Credit: http://www.walthandelsman.com/)

improving the negative

This came through in the abstract of a linguistics (AmE) dissertation/(BrE) thesis:

The ungrammaticality can be improved by supplying the expression with a tense or a syntactic context.

I'm pretty sure that means that the expression seems more grammatical if it has supporting context, but 'improving ungrammaticality' seems a different thing. My impression is that this kind of

negative thing + positive growth = less negative

interpretation is more likely to happen in passive contexts ('ungrammaticality was improved' versus the active 'this improves ungrammaticality').

Language Log covers a lot of similar things with regularity.

Five years

"And all the fat-skinny people, and all the tall-short people
And all the nobody people, and all the somebody people
I never thought I'd need so many people"

the opposite of unicorn is donkey

...at least that's what I learned by reading this.

Rules of attraction

Theresa May and Donald Trump are not, in fact, opposites.  Discuss.