After years of fielding language questions, I’ve learnt it’s unwise to be definitive about definitions.
Contronyms in two other polls stirred the possum. A contronym owns contradictory meanings, such as “screened” and “clip” . Glitches in the matrix, they often demand a vote to determine which way the pendulum swings. How can society function if one person’s “lucked out” is another’s happiness, attached to the same phrase?Duty-bound, I took the enigma to the virtual village.
This result left me nonplussed. And, by that, I mean bewildered rather than unperturbed, as 58 per cent of speakers believe the word means in another straw vote. Tellingly, most dictionaries fail to reflect that semantic bias, since real-time polls operate between alehouse and publishing house, the proving grounds far from the ivory towers.Phonetically, I put the Mac in “machination”, as do 584 speakers of the 927 votes polled.
This is not dumbing down, but catching up. After your third Pfizer, say, your “boostered” status may seem the correct version to you, but most patients dwell in the “boosted” camp. As for our coffee date next weekend, that muddle needs sorting, since 305 people reckon that “next weekend” translates as the weekend coming, while 303 of us believe I’m referring to the weekend after that. That’s too ambiguous to call. Expect a new poll next weekend just to fathom when the hell we’re meeting.