File 13

File 13

I’ve decided to create a new category for this blog- File 13- which will contain various things. A few examples of things which may end up in this category might be-

1.) things I think are interesting or worth a link for some reason but I don’t really see how they fit in within the larger context of the informative/activism/solutions type orientations of this blog.

2.) Things which may fit in in some way, but don’t necessarily merit a blog post all to themselves.

3.) a random escape valve outlet for thoughts, ideas, rants, whatever.

So, despite the implications of the category’s name don’t dismiss it out of hand. Also, I’ll be posting other relevant tags and categories specific to the individual posts within this  category.

Think of it as sort of a links grab bag.

Self referential YouTube video

What happens when you mistake the title box for the post box on wordpress…

I recently found out about a word- enantiodromia- which when I looked up the definition reminded me of another word- widdershins. So I looked them both up together. One result which I found was this one, which I’ll quote from:

In his 1989 book Crazy English (Pocket Books, ISBN 0-671-68907-X), Richard Lederer calls such words and phrases “contronyms” and lists 41. This phenomenon has been a curiosity to users of language for

as long as there has been language and has many names
addad (Arabic) antilogy antiphrasis auto-antonymy didh (Arabic) enantiodromia (Greek) enantiosemy (Greek) enantiosis (Greek) gegensinn (German) Janus words l’shon hefech (Hebrew) mirror words oysterisms polarity self-antonymy turncoat words

in this case, enantiodromia basically can refer to words which come to mean their opposite over the course of time. Of course, widdershins can mean either clockwise or counterclockwise depending where and when on the planet Earth one happens to be at a particular moment. Residing at or near the Equator over the course of a few seasons, one can observe the word widdershins coming to mean its opposite over the course of time. Given this, I would suggest another possible name for words which come to mean their own opposite over time would be widdershins.

Of course, that would mean that widdershins would be an autological word describing a class of words which mean the opposite of themselves. Moving up a level, widdershins could then replace both autological and heterological, since it is a good example of an autological word and also means the opposite of itself. Maybe. Who shaves the barber?

Are you more right brained, left brained or ambicerebral? Try this test… can you get her to swing back and forth like a pendulum? How about so it appears she is facing away from you while swinging back and forth like a pendulum?