Ryan North, author of Dinosaur Comics, likes a lexical relation. I don't want to steal his comics, so forgive the links-only approach. I'll do a little summary:
John Williams of Portsmouth University has been thinking about the American election in a way that I particularly enjoy: using voting strategies to illustrate antonym terminology (describing different logical types of opposition):
Vote Clinton because she's not Trump --> binary antonyms
Vote Clinton because she's not as bad as Trump --> gradable antonyms#semantics
Oh my goodness, I've learned a new word that I can't believe I hadn't run across before in my work. Maybe I had, and forgot it. But anyhow:
“We lead not by the example of our power, but by the power of our
example.” That was Joe Biden (quoting Bill Clinton) at the Democratic
National Convention, using perhaps a politician’s favorite rhetorical
device: antimetabole. Great word, huh? It’s from the Greek, like so many literary terms of art, in this case a Greek word meaning “turning about.”
I've given up sweets for most of June, so I'm thinking a lot about Cake.
Cake made it into the Opposites Playlist twice, once with Shirt Skirt/Long Jacket.
I love the lyrics to this song, and so I'll quote a bit more than necessary to point out another opposite in them:
I want a girl who gets up early
I want a girl who stays up late
I want a girl with uninterrupted prosperity
Who uses a machete to cut through red tape
With fingernails that shine like justice
And a voice that is dark like tinted glass
She is fast and thorough
And sharp as a tack
She's touring the facility
And picking up slack
I want a girl with a short skirt and a lonnnnng.... jacket
The other Opposites Playlist song had to be 'Sheep go to Heaven, Goats go to Hell'.
Both of the song titles use ancillary antonymy--antonyms in parallel structures in order to create a secondary contrast, so skirt and jacket are contextual opposites here, as are sheep and goats.
Heaven and Hell have a special place in my heart (or brain) because they are an example in Alan Cruse's Lexical Semantics that gave me some good food for thought when I was writing my first book, where I'm claiming that oppositeness is about minimal contextually relevant difference. So here's a big excerpt from my chapter 5:
Using Heaven/Hell
as an example, Cruse notes that that opposition embodies others, including good/bad, up/down, and bliss/torment (and others, like light/dark and good/evil, are easily added to the list).If so many differences are relevant in
contrasting Heaven/Hell, how can we
claim that their opposition involves minimal
difference?And even if we can make
this claim, should we?
Assuming
that we are considering the semantic field of Judeo-Christian
afterlife locales, the field allows at most (if you’re Catholic) two
options to choose from when selecting an opposite for Heaven:Hell or Purgatory.Heaven and Hell, unlike Purgatory, have much
in common:they’re where one spends
eternity, they reflect a definitive judgment on a person’s life, they have
imagined physical locations, and each is the home of a supernatural lord and
countless souls.Nevertheless, this is
probably an oversimplification of the problem.The fact is, Heaven/Hell are
similar because they have the same types of properties (such as judgment,
location, inhabitants), but opposite instantiations of those
property-types.Each has a lord, but
they’re opposite lords (god/devil).Each
has a location, but they’re opposite locations (up/down).Thus, their similarities beget differences,
and so it could be said that Heaven
and Hell are as different as they are
similar.
Such
differences-within-similarities are often favored over straight similarities in
choosing opposites.Let’s consider a
larger contrast set:winter/spring/summer/autumn.Of these, winter/summer
are most strongly contrasted as an opposite pair, and we can again see
differences within similarities.They
both involve extreme temperatures, but one is hot and the other is cold.They both (officially) start with solstices,
but one involves long days/short nights and the other long nights/short
days.If opposition favored greatest
similarities, then we should expect winter/autumn
to be better opposites than winter/summer,
since both are cool and dark.But
instead, we prefer the two that differ in symmetrical ways.
The
lesson to be learned from this is that similarity [...] runs deep in a good complex antonym pair.Rather than the superficial similarity of contiguous temperatures (winter/autumn), we prefer the pair that
is similar in extremity of temperature.It matters less to us what the temperature is, than what type of
temperature it is.It’s this deeper similarity
that makes the contrast between summer and
winter symmetrical, diametrical, and
truly incompatible (whereas autumn and winter could arguably overlap).So, winter
and summer are more similar in types
of attributes than either is to autumn or
spring. (Murphy, Semantic Relations and the Lexicon, 2003)
