Showing posts with label quotations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quotations. Show all posts

Wednesday, 28 December 2016

the opposite of 'cry'


 From 'Bottom' with Rik Mayall and Ade Edmonson:

        Eddie:       ...Cry did you?
        War veteran: Quite the opposite actually.
        Eddie:       What? You sucked water in through your eyes?

Happy for deep people

Sally Sparrow: I love old things. They make me feel sad.
Kathy Nightingale: What's good about sad?
Sally Sparrow: It's happy for deep people.
—'Blink', Doctor Who (2007)

'Downhill' as auto-antonym

Anne Curzan in the Lingua Franca blog,  'It's all downhill from here':
"A friend of mine’s daughter spotted a (semi-) auto-antonym — a word that has two opposing meanings — that was not on my radar: downhill. As she pointed out, the word can be positive when we use it metaphorically to refer to something getting easier from this point forward, and it can be very not positive when we use it metaphorically to refer to something (or everything!) getting worse from this point forward. It’s clearly not a perfect auto-antonym in that the meanings are not exactly semantic opposites (easier vs. worse), but it’s not outside the ballpark."

Tuesday, 16 August 2016

opposite Georges