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The individual words make sense and are arranged according to proper grammatical rules, yet the result is nonsense. The inspiration for this attempt at creating verbal nonsense came from the idea of contradiction and seemingly irrelevant and/or incompatible characteristics, which conspire to make the phrase meaningless, but are open to ...
For instance, while the word "devout" has no direct opposite, it is easy to conceptualize a scale of devoutness, where "devout" lies at the positive end with a missing counterpart at the negative end. In certain cases, opposites can be formed with prefixes like "un-" or "non-," with varying levels of naturalness.
Negative words such as bad [9] and sick sometimes acquire ironic senses by antiphrasis [10] referring to traits that are impressive and admired, if not necessarily positive (that outfit is bad as hell; lyrics full of sick burns). Some contronyms result from differences in varieties of English.
In historical linguistics, the process of an inoffensive word becoming pejorative is a form of semantic drift known as pejoration.An example of pejoration is the shift in meaning of the word silly from meaning that a person was happy and fortunate to meaning that they are foolish and unsophisticated. [3]
If the prefix or suffix is negative, such as 'dis-' or -'less', the word can be called an orphaned negative. [ 2 ] Unpaired words can be the result of one of the words falling out of popular usage, or can be created when only one word of a pair is borrowed from another language, in either case yielding an accidental gap , specifically a ...
The psychological literature has distinguished between several different forms of ambivalence. [4] One, often called subjective ambivalence or felt ambivalence, represents the psychological experience of conflict (affective manifestation), mixed feelings, mixed reactions (cognitive manifestation), and indecision (behavioral manifestation) in the evaluation of some object.
In the modern world, negative criticism has acquired the stigma of "being negative", and people who make negative criticisms can be easily exploited or manipulated. For this reason, many people nowadays express their negative criticism simply by not saying anything, not paying attention to something or someone, or by being absent.
Semantic change (also semantic shift, semantic progression, semantic development, or semantic drift) is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage.