who shall remain antonymous: comedy

Showing posts with label comedy. Show all posts

Sunday, 28 December 2025

Not a cat (Blackadder)

On the fourth day of Antonym Christmas, the Internet gave to me:

a definition starting with D

Blackadder 3.2: Ink and Incapability

Baldrick's definition of cat: 'not a dog'.

I particularly like this because my first book has an argument for cat/dog being antonyms (or opposites, depending on your definition of antonym):

For Deese (1965) and many since, antonymy is only indicated if two contrasting items reciprocally trigger each other in word-association tasks. When asked the opposite of peanut butter, American English speakers are likely to say jelly, but when asked the opposite of jelly, they might well say jam. Compare the pair cat/dog, which seems more properly antonymous (in the inclusive sense of the word). While they are each part of a larger contrast set that offers many other potential antonyms, they often co-occur in varying contexts and our conceptual knowledge about their referents allows for a ‘minimal difference’ interpretation under RC-LC. Unlike for gin and tonic, both cat(s) and dog(s) and dog(s) and cat(s) occur regularly in the British National Corpus (forty-two and fifty-six occurrences, respectively). The words also co-occur in a variety of set phrases, as in (3). (3) raining cats and dogs fight like cats and dogs cats and dogs or dogs and cats (= ‘speculative securities’) And they are replaceable in other phrases and compounds: (4) a cat/dog person dog/cat food The juxtaposition of cat/dog in both fixed expressions and creative language use encourages us to view them as a stored canonical pair rather than as a lexicalized conventional phrase. The fact that the two can be deemed ‘minimally different,’ based on what we know about cats and dogs, encourages us to view them as canonical opposites. They are different in that they have incompatible reference, but similar in that they are basic-level terms for four-legged, furry animals that are commonly kept as house pets and that are tame enough and of an appropriate size to remain uncaged and interact with people. These similarities are what makes dog the more usual opposite for cat than mouse (which differs in size, tameness, pet status), even though cat-mouse are experientially reinforced through their own set of expressions (play cat and mouse with; when the cat’s away, the mouse will play).

Murphy ML. 2003. Semantic Relations and the Lexicon: Antonymy, Synonymy and Other Paradigms. Cambridge University Press.

Thursday, 25 December 2025

Left, that's it (Olaf Falafel)

I've not posted here in a long time, but I have still been collecting things I've meant to post. So, I'm doing The 12 Antonym Blog Posts of Christmas 2025.

On the first day of Antonym Christmas, my internet gave to me: An Olaf Falafel pun.

Olaf Falafel tweet, 12 Sept 2024: My wife started teasing me for not knowing my left from right. I said left that's it, , and packed up my things and right her there and then.

Saturday, 25 June 2022

Sunday, 17 June 2018

My new fave antonym

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

"It didn't backfire! It frontwatered!"

Tuesday, 16 August 2016

opposite Georges

George: “If Relationship George walks through this door, he will kill Independent George. A George, divided against itself, cannot stand!”
— Seinfeld Quotes (@seinlanguage) 16 August 2016

Monday, 18 July 2016

If pro is the opposite of con...

Barry Popik's etymology blog has a piece on 'If pro is the opposite of con' jokes:

...then Congress is the opposite of progress
...then the Constitution is the opposite of prostitution.

Any others?

Sunday, 12 June 2016

A Not-Suitable-for-Children case of simultaneous antonymy

Some work that we did in the oughties looked at the relative proportions of "Simultaneous Antonymy" (Steve Jones's term) in English, Swedish, and Japanese. Simultaneous use of antonyms is when both are used at the same time about the same thing, like It's both warm and cool now. You don't find many of these in English, but you find more in Swedish than in English, and more in Japanese than in Swedish. (The relevant articles are in our special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics.)

So I enjoyed finding this simultaneous case in the wild. The wild here being the Tiger Lillies' Facebook page (which is indeed fairly wild).

Tuesday, 17 May 2016

dog, not cat

Another thing I failed to cite when writing about antonyms. In my 2003 book I make the case that dog can be considered the opposite of cat, and here's Baldrick defining dog as 'not a cat'.

Thursday, 5 May 2016

George Costanza does the opposite

It is a failure of my academic life that I've never cited this in a publication.