By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 19/03/2026This is one of the things I love about being a native English speaker - this glorious mongrel language of ours is full of *extremely* weird words, like "cleave," which means its own opposite ("to join together" and "to cut apart"). 3/ 1140
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 19/03/2026English is *full* of these words that mean their own opposite, from "dust" to "oversight" to "weather": www.mentalfloss.com/language/wor... This is what you get when you let a language *run wild*, with meaning determined (and contested) by speakers. 4/mentalfloss.com40 Words and Phrases That Are Their Own OppositesYou're about to stumble into the looking-glass world of contronyms—words that are their own antonyms. 1153
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 19/03/2026Not for nothing, my second language is Yiddish, another glorious higgeldy-piggeldy of a tongue with no authoritative oversight and innumerable dialects. Semantic drift is a feature, not a bug. It's how we get new words, and new meanings for old words. I love semantic drift! 5/ 1151
