DUALITY OF MEANING

DOUBLE-EDGED (S)WORDS

“RAISE YOUR WORDS, NOT YOUR VOICE. IT IS RAIN THAT GROWS FLOWERS, NOT THUNDER,” SAID THE HERALDED 13TH CENTURY POET, JURIST AND SUFI MYSTIC RUMI. JOSEPHINE BESTIC AGREES.

The signs are there – words provide direction and guidance, but what if one word means different things?

As a nerdy introvert whose parents kept her from Port Elizabeth’s “children who were rough”, my youth was spent skipping school to sneak off to the library where I’d devour everything from Asterix to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with a spot of Teach Yourself Cyrillic or How to Become a Royal Marine thrown in for light relief.

Unsurprisingly, I emerged into callow adulthood with a prodigious vocabulary but, for many, many years, not much of an outlet. Anyone who has seen Keenan Ivory Wayans’s hilarious spoof from In Living Color on the United Negro Scholarship Fund will know. YouTube it: it’s teenage me in prison, in a fez, spewing infinite non sequiturs with no-one around to appreciate them. A secondary benefit though, is an enduring obsession for whimsical words. Recently, a typical Monday daydream led to the epiphany that ‘resignation’ meant leaving, or stoically staying. What? Quickly forgetting the week’s woes, I started wondering how many other words are as two-faced. A long, finely-honed list, it turns out. Contranyms, or Janus words (after the Roman god of, amongst other things, duality, who is depicted as having two faces, simultaneously looking to the future and to the past) are a semantic delight.

Most contranyms are also homonyms (as opposed to hominins, our paleontological forebears; though both are as difficult to say out loud as red lorry, yellow lorry) as they are pronounced the same way. For interest’s sake, heteronyms are words that are spelled the same way, but are pronounced differently, and have different meanings (lead pipe vs lead singer).

Here are a few contranyms that caught my imagination. Bolt: to run from; to close or lock Cleave: to split; to stick fast to Enjoin: urge a person to do something; legally prohibit them from doing so Fine: Exceptional; adequate (you just visualised the eye roll that goes with the latter, right?) Peer: a member of the highest aristocratic social order; an equal Quantum: Smallest particle; significant amount Refrain: when something is repeated (in a song); to stop doing something Rock: immovable object; shaking motion Sanction: approve; boycott Splice: to separate; to join together

There are many more, though some are debatable – one list I found asserts that literally can be virtually or actually. Fine. But I’m leaving that one for the millennials. In researching these words, I learned a new one: the lawyers among you will know quiddity as a quibble or trivial matter, but it can also mean the very essence of an object. Maybe you knew that too? An exciting day for me, nonetheless.

Author Isaac Babel famously said, “No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place”. Or a well-considered linguistic thrust, as it turns out. In my book, if a thoughtful vocabulary is the armoury of language, then contranyms are right up there with rapiers and épées. En garde! And I’m off to my next lesson.