Semantris

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

a stupidly addictive game

When new word game apps, like Wordle and Spelling Bee, came out, I was so grateful for their once-a-day rationing. You see, I used to have an addiction to Tetris, and I would go the same way if there had been unlimited Spelling Bee. (There probably is—please don't point me toward it.)

But then Google research, in a clever way to get me hooked on an AI bot, released its Semantris games, which combines word association (antonyms are very useful here) with Tetris.  (I play the untimed Block version.)  I have lost my Christmas holidays to it. You have been warned.

Here's the link to play, if you dare.

Some opposite links.

Unexpected Opposites by Mike Pope on Visual Thesaurus blog. (2014)

Quiz: which opposite came first? Oxford Words (2015)

Pollyanna hypothesis confirmed in big-data study (2015)

three words game

A Facebook friend posted the following:

Silly game doing the rounds: what are the three words that are the absolutely least likely words to be used to describe you ?

What interested me was how people went about answering this question--i.e. "think of how I'd describe myself, then think of the opposite".

I used a different strategy: pick three words that probably wouldn't cross my mind when thinking about myself. I'd maintain this is the more reliable strategy.

Others have mostly chosen some fairly broad scalar adjectives, this means:

1. They're all relative. The person who says they'd never be described as tall might well be so described by a four-year-old. Someone might well say he's too monogamous for my liking about someone else who thinks they're unlikely to be described as monogamous.
2. Some of words can apply to different things. You may be unlikely to be described as conservative in your politics (though, see (1), you might well be conservative in comparison to someone else). But what about your haircut? The way you load the dishwasher? The way you make bets at the races? You may well be conservative in some domain.
3. Even if you're at the lowest extreme of the scale of tallness, monogamy, conservatism, you're still on that scale. So the word is likely to come up in describing you, whether it's negated or said sarcastically or whatever.

If you describe me, there will be little cause to say I'm not haemophiliac, not Korean, or a little bit pencilcase unless we traipse into metaphor. (Maybe I could have chosen a bit better for the last one, as the metaphors from it might be too close to me.)

But I'm not writing this to say that I won this game. (But, c'mon, I did.) I'm writing it to say: isn't it interesting how we immediately reach for antonyms when we think about what things are not.  I just had a slice of pizza for lunch. It was not very spicy. It was not very warm. But it was really not very periwinkle, oceanic, or batik. While the relative warmth of my pizza is relevant, it's not very much fun to think about. Thinking about the fact that my pizza was not batik might amuse me for the rest of the afternoon.

But then, that's me.

a party game

The aforementioned Opposites Party was attended by people from lots of different parts of my life who wouldn't have known each other (or in a couple of cases who wouldn't have known anyone but me), so I wanted an ice-breaker to get people to chat with each other. And what are antonyms for, if not to bring people together? (They've brought me together with several co-authors over the years, after all.)

The key to the opposites game is that antonyms are more alike than different. If antonyms were really different, then frisbee could be the opposite of exorcism or some such thing. But no. Hot is the opposite of cold because they're both very alike: they are both basic bits of vocabulary describing extremes of temperature.

So, in the opposites game, everyone is assigned a label with one half of an opposite pair, which they wear. They then have to find their opposite at the party. When they've found each other, they have to chat until they find something non-obvious that they have in common. (I put in the 'non-obvious' bit because I wanted them to have a conversation that got past such facts as  'We're both at the same party' or 'We both know Lynne'.)

Once they'd done that, they were asked to put their labels in my guest book, add their names to them and write down the thing they have in common. Here's a bit of the result, i.e. my keepsake from the party.

(The Birthday Boy badge was an opposite gift from my opposite: the other Lynne the linguist at Sussex. You know we're opposites because we have more in common than we have different.)

The opposites I chose for the labels were varied in their obviousness versus obscurity. The cruelest was probably cryptic-quick (which will only be clear to readers of certain newspapers who are familiar with their crossword puzzles).

I recommend the game, and I think most of the people at my party would too.