Discussion
I keep thinking about the number of contronyms in English. These are words that mean the opposite of themselves.
In English you can clip paper (together) with a paper clip or (like Norwegian) you can clip paper (meaning to cut it up). So clip means both to attach and to seperate.
@ruari
You can cleave a chicken in two;
and a child can cleave to its mother.
You can "let" a person in (allow); or a traveller can be granted free movement "without hindrance or let" (impediment)
@ruari An older English one is "cleave." You can cleave, as in to cut or separate, or you can cleave to, meaning to pair or connect tightly.
@ruari Well, Norwegian (like many other languages) has the same word for "to advertise" and "to complain about a defective product".
@ruari Clip is fascinating since we also (used to) call cuttings from a news paper "clippings" (as in cutting out a specific article). And we have "hedge clippers" for working on trimming a tree/bush and there is no comparable version of "way to stick parts of a tree back together" that involves the word.
Also while fast normally means to move quickly, it can also (like Norwegian) mean not moving at all. You most commonly see this in fasten but you can also say that you are 'stuck fast' or tell someone to hold something fast. So fast means both moving quickly and not moving at all. 🤣
@ruari You got me curious about these two meanings of fast, so I stopped by the online etymological dictionary to do some reading. Apparently fast, in the sense of quick, developed in english under the influence of the scandinavian languages
I picked these for my Norwegian readers but there are loads of these. Here is another, if I describe an animal as shelled, it means it has a shell. If I tell you I have shelled peanuts, that means… they have no shell.
I can drop a record, so that is available for people to listen or I could drop a project which means it is not available.
If I dust my home I remove dust. If I dust a cake I am adding dust (well sugar… but you get it).
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