the blog opposite

Arnold Zwicky has recently written a couple of post relating to antonymy on his blog. Always worth reading AZ, whose own initials seem a bit oppositey.


11/21/18: One Big Happy analyses:
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2018/11/21/obh-analyses/

12/5/18: uncle-o-nym:
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2018/12/05/uncle-o-nym/

electric/acoustic

Love it.

10 year old just asked if he should brush his teeth “electric or acoustic” 🤟🏻

— Lauren Laverne (@laurenlaverne) 3 September 2018

the opposite of digital nomad?

This came in my inbox today.

I've read enough articles about digital nomads in my time. (That amounts to two articles, I think.) but I had to skim this one enough to find out what the opposite was. And the answer is (according to this author): digital settler. That is, an entrepreneur who stops traveling:

I’m digital without the nomad. What does that make me? A settler? Whether saying no to travel is mad or wise, I don’t know. But I can wholeheartedly say: Most of the happiness you gain from working for yourself comes from having a choice, much more so than from whatever choice in particular you make.

Of course, another possibility is that the opposite of a digital nomad is a non-digital nomad. But I suppose that's just a nomad. And the thing about opposites is that they have to be minimally different. A nomad, especially the prototypical nomad, traveling on foot or animal through desolate landscapes, is different in many ways from a young person who works on a laptop in cafés around the world. A person staying in one place working on a laptop is closer to a person who jets around and works on a laptop.

So, the author has gone from traveling to not-traveling, and this is for him enough to make him the opposite of his former identity.

My new fave antonym

Titus Andromedon in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Season 4, episode 5):

"It didn't backfire! It frontwatered!"

many kinds of 'happy'

One thing that always interests me as an antonymist is how a single positive term can have many different-meaning opposites. So, sweet can be the opposite of sour, salty or bitter, depending on context, and happy is opposed to sad, angry, and possibly others. It reminds me of the Anna Karenina principle: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Anyhow, I like T-Rex's attention to the different kinds of positive emotion (click to enlarge):