Google trends: contextual oppositions

xkcd presents some contextual oppositions:

oh no - not oh no

Dinosaur Comics has a guest artist and a comic I love:

big little large small great

Every work on antonymy needs a big ol' section on why big/little are 'better' antonyms than large/little. I know, I've written more than one.

Too bad I didn't have xkcd's handy guide!

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!"