Kansas Snapshots by Gloria Freeland - January 24, 2025

A new "onym"

While Mr. Webster never had anything to fear from me, I have often mentioned my fascination with languages and their component parts - words. Part of that interest is professional. Certain words like "the" and "and" can be used sentence after sentence, and the brain does not object. But if a writer uses "efficiency" or "automobile" in three or sometimes even just two lines, our gray matter seems to scream "too much!" Note that I chose "lines" and "gray matter" to avoid repeating "sentence" and "brain."

But I have it easy compared to, say, poets or lyricists. They frequently need to find a word that conveys not just the right meaning, but rhymes with another as well.

And the rockets' red glow
The bombs bursting in the sky
Gave proof through the dark
That our flag was still waving.

somehow doesn't have the impact of:

And the rockets' red glare
The bombs bursting in air
Gave proof through the night
That our flag was still there.

An example of how these "word wanderings - or wonderings" can surface occurred during husband Art's "Sound of Music" passion project I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. In the show's song "Sixteen Going on Seventeen," Rolf, the boyfriend of the oldest daughter, warns Liesl of her naivete. One verse states:

Totally unprepared are you
To face a world of men.
Timid and shy and scared are you
Of things beyond your ken.

I think it would be fair to say that the word "ken" is not commonly used today. It refers to someone's accumulated knowledge.

Art wondered if the word was connected to the German word "kennen," which means something someone has learned through experience. A quick etymological check validated his guess. We English speakers had "borrowed" the word and then tweaked it by dropping the second syllable.

Then he had another hunch. Why do "knowledge" and "know" have a "k" as the first letter since we do not pronounce it? Was it also borrowed from German and, over time, the pronunciation changed? That turned out to be true, too!

Some years ago, Art saw an article posted on the internet titled something like "Words we use incorrectly." It said the word "peruse" is typically chosen when a speaker means he or she scanned something superficially, but the article stated peruse meant to look in detail. A quick check of the dictionary appeared to confirm this.

But that wasn't the whole story!

In my column about nostalgia, I used "peruse" and wanted to make sure I had done so properly, so I went to the dictionary. What I discovered was that there is a whole category of words that have contradictory meanings. While peruse can be used to mean to "carefully inspect something," it can also mean to "browse through it." These are called contronyms - words that have opposite meanings.

"Onym" in Greek means "name." Like my classmates in school, I had encountered it when we learned about synonyms, words with similar meanings - "begin" and "start;” antonyms, words that have opposite meanings - "good" and "bad;" and homonyms, words spelled or pronounced the same way, but have different meanings - "to" and "too" and "two." But I guess I was absent the day we discussed contronyms.

So how did we end up with them?

One way - and peruse is an example - is when we adopted two words from different languages that sound the same, yet have opposing meanings in their respective languages. Peruse can be traced to the joining of the English words parts "per" and "use." The English prefix "per," such as in the words "perdition" and "perfect," means completely or thoroughly. Joined with "use," peruse means to go through something thoroughly, leaving no stone unturned.

But when William the Conqueror and his men invaded England in 1066, they brought along their French language. "Peruser," in his tongue, meant to examine something rather superficially - thoroughness was not employed.

Another way a contronym can occur is to frequently use a seemingly unrelated word in a certain situation that eventually becomes associated with the setting. The Hawaiian word "aloha" literally means "love" and was, perhaps, part of a longer phrase such as "my love to you." The phrase may have been said upon meeting someone or on their departure. Repeated use in this situation means today aloha is used to say "hello" and "goodbye." For that matter, our English "goodbye" or "bye" is a trimmed and twisted version of the phrase "God be with you."

The German word "bitte" has a similarly confusing use. It literally means "please" and is often encountered in a request for help. The person helped will typically respond "danke," the equivalent of "thank you." But then many German helpers will echo "bitte," meaning something like "you're welcome." This results in the word being both a request for help and an acknowledgment of help delivered.

When using a contronym, the speaker or writer has the burden of making certain the desired meaning is selected by the listener or reader. "She perused the book" could cause one person to conclude she skimmed through it, while another could take it to mean she carefully read every word. "She quickly/carefully perused the book" makes it clear, depending on which modifier is chosen.

Dusting the furniture implies removing particles that settle from the air, but dusting cookies with sugar means adding sweetening crystals.

A "sanctioned event" might be one that was approved by authorities or one that had been prohibited by them.

Giving someone a bill might mean asking them for payment, but could also mean handing over some currency.

In a recipe, one person's dollop might be a small amount, while another takes it to mean a big blob.

The word "left" can mean either leaving or remaining as in "After two people left, how many were left?"

OK, I'm done ... and I'll leave it to you to decide if that means I've reached the end or am thoroughly fatigued!