Sunday 12 June 2016

A Not-Suitable-for-Children case of simultaneous antonymy

Some work that we did in the oughties looked at the relative proportions of "Simultaneous Antonymy" (Steve Jones's term) in English, Swedish, and Japanese. Simultaneous use of antonyms is when both are used at the same time about the same thing, like It's both warm and cool now. You don't find many of these in English, but you find more in Swedish than in English, and more in Japanese than in Swedish. (The relevant articles are in our special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics.)

So I enjoyed finding this simultaneous case in the wild. The wild here being the Tiger Lillies' Facebook page (which is indeed fairly wild).


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