semantic - orthographical ancillary antonymy

 The title of this post will only make sense to the nerdiest antonym nerd, but what's neat about this...

...is the mix of a semantic opposition involving a proper noun's common noun sense, and an orthographic (spelling) opposition. Very cute.

"Be kind" versus "don't be mean"

I'm thinking a bit about all of the admonitions to "be kind" these days. I'm very much in favo(u)r of kindness, especially in the guises of patience and helpfulness, but I do understand why some people express suspicion of "kindness" as an admonition.

But now I'm thinking about "be kind" versus "don't be mean" and the power of the negative admonition.

When feeding back on others' writing, I often advise them to lead with positive statements rather than negative ones where possible. (I read so many "This study will not study X, but Y." Lead with the Y, please!)  But in this kind of admonition, I think leading with the negative does more. Google's famous(ly abandoned) "don't be evil" feels like a better check on behavio(u)r than "be/do good", for instance. Being good is a tall order. Not everything you do will be good, and that has to be OK. But it's important that what you do isn't evil. It's the line between not-evil and evil that we don't want to cross. Less important is the line between good and not-good.

Self-improvement gurus often push the positive. For instance, for weight loss, they prescribe mantras like  "eat more vegetables" rather than "don't eat sweets". Such cases are different from the good/evil case, though. "Don't eat sweets" tells you not to do something you want to do. "Don't be evil" tells you to not do something you didn't want to do in the first place. It needs to be said not because you would otherwise set out on an evil pathway, but because it keeps you mindful of the potential for evil. It makes you scan your behavio(u)r for inadvertent or coincidental evil. (This might be an argument against The Law of the Ridiculous Reverse.)

I was thinking about this because I chuckled at a Facebook post that implied that people with certain views are stupid, and I've been trying to ask myself "is this kind?" before I do things on the internet. Would it have been kind of me to share that post? No. 

 

But then again, most of the posts I share are not kind. I just shared a picture of a chandelier I liked. Not actually kind. If my intention is to only share kind things on Facebook, then maybe I shouldn't have shared it.

The "don't be mean" admonition allows the sharing of the chandelier, but discourages the sharing of the put-down. It gets down to what's important and therefore is a less boring and more direct question to repeatedly ask myself: is this mean (to/about someone)? So much more satisfying than "is this kind?"

Our university has kindness as one of its corporate values. This means that whenever something I don't like is happening at the university, I annoyingly ask the higher-ups: "How is our value of kindness being practi{c/s}ed here?" 

But what if instead of saying "we will be kind to each other" the university community agreed "we won't be mean to each other"? I have to say, I think I'd have a much easier time knowing if people were acting mean than if they were being kind... 
 

Of course, having indefinable values makes things easier for a corporation, because it's harder to hold them to their values and slogans. This is why Google's "don't be evil" motto was refreshing, and why other corporate entities aren't rushing to imitate it. Their (parent company's) new motto is "Do the right thing"—unhelpfully presupposing that there is exactly one right thing (as opposed to many bad ones?) and thus making it a nearly impossible motto to follow. Which is evil. 

 

But then it's claimed that the problem with the old slogan was that don't be evil means different things to different people. I don't think that matters that much because one doesn't need to please everyone here. Taking "don't be mean" as my motto means that I should not do things that I consider to be mean. If other people consider other things to be mean, then it would be kind to listen to what they have to say about that. But what "don't be mean" means to me is that I should be running my potential behavio(u)rs past my conscience. There's a reason they call the conscience a "little voice". It's easily drowned out. So I have to listen for it. Don't be mean, Lynne. And maybe sometimes you'll be kind. 

 

 

P.S. I've just been reminded of the similar admonition "Don't be a dick". I'm going to stick with "don't be mean" because mean is an adjective and dick is a noun. Nouns are more time-insensitive than adjectives, which means that the barriers to nounhood are higher. To put it as an analogy:

Don't be mean:Don't be a dick::Be kind:Be a saint.

You can be kind without being a saint. Kind is the gateway to sainthood. Similarly, you can be mean without making it to dickhood. So, I could justify some mean behavio(u)r by saying "Well, it's mean, but that doesn't make me a complete dick." My goal is to stay off the path to dickhood entirely, so I'm going to stick with don't be mean.

longage and coolth

Antonyms are often (if not usually) uneven. Long and short describe different directions in the same dimension, but we can only (unless we're being a little silly) measure things in length: two feet long, not two feet short. Even if two feet is short, the thing has a length, not a shorth. Because of the way measurement works, it's generally the word that describes the upward direction on the scale that is more 'unmarked', which is to say it can be used in more contexts, like measurements. 

One word that I like a lot, because it seems to go against this trend, is coolth. This is convenient for the particular treatment of gradable adjective meaning that was central to my doctoral work—coolth works better than shorth (semantically speaking) because measurement of temperature and measurement of length work a bit differently. Things can usually get colder (yes, there's an absolute zero, but you'll be dead before you experience it), but once they get too short, they cease to exist.

The word coolth has been around since at least the 1540s, but it probably gets re-invented nearly every time it's used, since no one's hearing it much. It's easy enough to see how to make it. Warmth has given us the recipe.

But anyway, I thought of my love for coolth when I read James Harbeck's blog post about the word longage. It's the opposite of shortage. It doesn't seem to have quite the history that coolth has, but then shortage has only been around since the late 19th century. (Thank you, American English.) And I thought: good for you, short. You got to be the word that did something morphologically interesting and then your opposite copied you. You got to have the kind of 'getting out and about' fun that the unmarked adjective usually gets to have. 

Anyhow, have a read of James's blog post about longage.

And now I find out he's got one about coolth too!