Very British Opposites

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Happy Valentine's Day

This showed up in my Facebook feed this morning:

Apparently you can buy it as a print here.

At different points in my life, I've believed (a) you can only really hate what you've really loved, and (b) you can never really hate what you've really loved.  The first option was teenage melodrama. I'm sticking with (b).

opposite v contrast

Since around the turn of the 20th century, people are using opposite less and contrast more.
When I use the terms in my linguistic work, I use contrast for when more than two things are being contrasted, and opposite when there are just two. I doubt this change in general English has anything to do with English speakers becoming less binary, though. The rise of contrast seems to be due to the rise of the phrase in contrast to. (I won't share all the ngrams, but you can look it up.)

But what is the downtrend for opposite about? I tried looking at collocates in the Corpus of Historical American English, and there are lots of different collocates if one compares the mid-19th and late-20th centuries. No clear explainers like a set phrase that's taken off. In the earlier data, there are more that have to do with politics, though: the opposite parties, opposite doctrine, opposite principles. Of course, in the 19th century, Americans fought a war against each other, so they really were opposed. The trends in the graph above, though, are not from American only. Maybe opposite is going down in part due to the rise of in contrast to. It's a possibly softer way to talk about opposed things.

Two other hypotheses that didn't pan out: the demise of opposite does not correlate with a similar increase in across from (that is, its prepositional use doesn't seem to have changed much), and there's barely any shift in the numbers for antonym (it's just a line along the bottom of the chart).

opposites in love

 

This picture came to me from the Tiger Lillies' Facebook page (thanks to @mertevenk for identifying the source, Construction Paper and Tears). Here, the opposites are connected by love. 

This reminded me of the epigram to the first chapter of my 2003 book, where another pair of opposites live in the same house. Is that because they are in love, too? [Click on the excerpt to make it bigger, should you need to.]

crosslinguistic opposite homophones

A little thing that amused me.

We're just back from a four-night visit to Lisbon (highly recommended!), which gave me my first real taste of Portuguese. I knew that 'x' is pronounced like 'sh', so of course, when I saw this sign on a door...

...I pushed.

Reader, it means 'pull'.  'Push' is empurre.

(You can hear it pronounced here.)

The Law of the Ridiculous Reverse, in practice

I've written about Simon Hoggart's Law of the Ridiculous Reverse, whereby political statements can be judged as meaningless if their opposites are absurd. Mark Steel in the Independent has put this into practice in an opinion piece on the recent parliamentary debate about whether Britain should bomb Syria. Here are a few choice bits (emphasis added):

Then there were the Labour MPs supporting the bombing, who all assured us: “I have given this matter a great deal of thought and not taken this decision lightly.” This was highly considerate of them. Not one of them said: “I’ve given this no thought as I couldn’t give a monkey’s wank. So I made my decision by putting two slugs on a beermat and the one on the left reached the end first, so I’m with Corbyn.”

Then came the speech by Hilary Benn, which was so powerful that it persuaded MPs such as Stella Creasy to vote with Cameron. She said afterwards: “Benn persuaded me fascism should be defeated.” 
Presumably then, until his speech, she thought fascism was worth a try. When she makes a full statement, it will say: “I always thought I might try fascism as a hobby when I retire, but Hilary explained the negative aspects very well so, on balance, I decided it’s best to defeat it.”

Dozens of MPs were keen to remind us how much Isis hates us, which would be a reasonable point, if people opposed to bombing were saying: “Oh, I don’t think they mind us all that much. We’ve just got off on the wrong foot. Maybe if we invite them to a barbecue we’ll find out we’ve got more in common that we realise.”

What's the opposite of Indonesia? Poland!

I don't know the original source, but this came into my Facebook feed from Languages Around the Globe. And it's beautiful.