A researcher in Port Jefferson, New York, wonders if there’s a single word that means the opposite of prejudice. Unhate? He suggests the word allophilia, a combination of Greek words that mean love or like of the other. This is part of a complete...
Disgruntled means “unhappy,” and gruntled means the opposite, although you almost never hear the latter. Playing with such unpaired words can be irresistible, whether you’re a poet or an essayist for The New Yorker. This is part of a complete...
In Zen Buddhism, the term all one refers to a state of enlightenment that’s the opposite of isolated and alone. The word alone, however, comes from the idea of “all on one’s own.” The word alone also gives us lone, lonely and lonesome, through a...
If a meeting gets pushed back, does it get postponed to a later time or rescheduled for a sooner one? Grant explains that push back is generally understood to mean “reschedule for a later date,” but Martha recounts a scenario where the opposite...
Do pregnant women enjoy pickles and ice cream? Linguists from the American Dialect Society have been discussing this recently. They found that the expression pickles and ice cream once referred simply to the conjoining of two unrelated things, sort...
In the U.K., they don’t count seconds as “one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi,” because, well, they have no Mississippi. Instead, they say “one-elephant, two-elephant.” Lynne Murphy, author of the blog Separated by a Common Language, points out this...