Here’s a partner to contronym that I covered recently; we garnish our salads and enjoy it; if someone garnishes our wages, we don’t.
This week’s work is also first-cousin, intellectually, to synonym, homonym (here and hear), and other oddities of English that so confuse many English-Language learners. It gets weird; “here” and “hear,” our homonyms, sound the same but mean different things. Meanwhile, heteronyms are spelled the same way, have different meanings, and pronounced differently. So here we go!
- John liked to row with the team but he got in a row with Mike, who said John rowed too slowly!
- Mary was a became advocate for an longer lunch break at the office. She would stop people in the hall to advocate for one-hour lunches and not a moment less!
- The delivery drivers took alternate routes to get to the distribution center and they liked to alternate between Ford and Nissan vans, depending on the weather.
- Holding up his bow, the violinist took a bow after his performance.
You will find lists for English and Italian at Wikipedia.
There’s no simple answer to why these differences emerged. English pronunciation morphs with, and sometimes, before, spelling changes. Native speakers simply learned both speaking and spelling (one hopes) by practice. Unlike contronyms and homonyms, as well as many figures of speech, “he took the bus” (did he steal it?), and phrasal verbs, “let’s go out! Let’s go to the movies tonight and we’ll go with Rick and Fred,” simply memorizing the context does not help with heteronyms.
Listen, repeat verbally, repeat the practice.
Incidentally, I changed the spelling of “contranym” to the more typical “contronym” at my earlier post, then discovered that they are both acceptable alternate spellings. Maybe I should alternate spellings!
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See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.
