Oversight

n. supervisory responsibility (from OED)

or

n. the act of passing something over through negligence (also from the OED)

I was ready to close my small run of auto-antonyms when Jonathan Cane suggested this one.  It is a wonderful word with two vastly opposing meanings, but one that can almost always be understood by context.  It comes from result of forming a compound with a preposition.  These often can result in too perfectly reasonable but different meanings.

I’m not sure if this would be a pure contranym because the two phrases don’t necessarily oppose each other.  Someone in charge of oversight could easily make an oversight, but the two ideas clearly don’t suit up for the same team.

Interestingly enough, the two different meanings are relatively equal in age according to the O.E.D.  As early as 1413, people were using the phrase to mean supervision (which is the exact same word if you think of it).  By 1477, it was already used to mean something that was missed.

Oddly enough, oversight can also be used as a verb.  One can oversight something by being negligent.  It was used in the 1600s, but has still been used in the twenty-first century.

As for Jonathan Cane, when he is not reading my blog, he is training people to run.  Check out his website at Citycoach Multisport if you are looking for a coach or if you just want to hear about how he looks good in moose antlers.

Bimonthly

adv. Twice a month

or

adv.  Every two months

Although not an auto-antonym in the purest sense of the word, bimonthly deserves mention.  Simply put, this is one of the most worthless words in the English language (yes I know there are no degrees of worthlessness).  It serves one purpose, to inform the reader the frequency with which something happens, but it fails to do that in every single occasion.  Looking this up in the O.E.D., I could not even tell what the original meaning of the word was, because all of the 19th century sentences made reference to a “bi-monthly meeting” or a “bi-monthly publication.”  The only way to make the word clear is to make it redundant.

Also useless is the sister word, biweekly, which suffers from the same failure.  When I first subscribed to ESPN the Magazine, a mistake in itself, I initially thought it was an outrageously cheap price for a subscription that came out twice a week.  It took only a few seconds to clarify the situation, but I was dumbstruck by the nature of the word.

At the scope of a year, the system is much more logical.  Biannual means twice a year; it is synonymic with semiannual.  Biennial means occuring every two years.  Two different times, two different words.  The way it should be.

This has me thinking: is there any other word in the English language that is still in common usage that has lost all sense of informativeness? Peruse would fall into this category, but at least you can sometimes get a sense of the meaning from context.

Peruse

v. to go through thoroughly

or

v. to skim or read in a leisurely way

Here is an example of a word that has become an auto-antonym through simple misuse.  Thanks to John Kuhner for bringing this one to my attention a long time ago.  The word, from its very origins circa 1533, has always meant to go through with great care.  One would peruse (Latin for “go through”) something, by definition, closely, most commonly a book.

Many people have learned the word incorrectly, and it is quite common to hear someone use it to mean to skim something, or to peruse in a leisurely, and not necessarily careful way.  This was my original understanding of the word.  The Webster and Collins dictionary use this as the final definition (often left to common-use definitions).  The Oxford dictionaries deny this as an acceptable definition at all.  My dictionary widget from Random House won’t give the second definition an entry, but it will acknowledge its common acceptance in a usage note.  It asserts that people who use it this way are wrong.  Dictionary.com’s entry, from the American Heritage Dictionary, also has a usage note.  In this they refer to a Star Chamberish “Usage Panel.”  The panel has slowly been wearing down on this secondary definition.  In 1988, 66% of the panel rejected this defintion.  In 1999, only 58% did.

Here is the problem.  If almost half of the expert-level English speakers (assuming this Usage Panel consists of “experts” and not schmos like me) use this word to mean contradictory things, than how could the word be of any use? At least with cleave, there is the addition of a preposition in the adhere definition.  If someone asks you to peruse something, there is no way to know the level of effort they are requesting.  Word purists will insist on the 1533 definition, but unless they are only planning to talk to each other, the problem remains.

Cleave

v. to part or divide by cutting asunder. (OED)

or.

v. to stick fast or to adhere (OED)

My friend, and a very talented musician, Sandra R.B. suggested this word as a possible auto-antonym, and it was one of two that I am readily familiar with.  I was at a wedding of a college roommate of mine in Vermont when I was first stumped by this.  Her wedding vows consisted of something akin to “to cleave on to you for the rest of my life.”  The phrase was quite jarring, considering that my only understanding of the word was the first definition above.  How could a word mean to rip asunder and to adhere together yet still have any meaning?  Never mind the fact that, as a noun, it also means an Irish basket.

This is a rare case of a true auto-antonym, as opposed to one that was formed from misuse.  The word is actually two different words, stemming from two different etymologies, that happen to be spelled and pronounced the same way and have meanings that contradict each other.

The two words are not necessarily identical in their other forms.  In both cases you can say that you cleaved something or cleaved to something, but other forms of the past tense exist that are more specific.  So the retired lumberjack clove wood and cleft wood, while the divorced couple clave each other.  Wood is cloven while a contract is cleaved to.  In the end, these two words at some point just became too close to each other, and could only be cloven when put into different tenses.

For the record, my Vermont roommate still cleaves to her husband.  They are building a beautiful inn, called the Snapdragon in Windsor, VT, and you can read about its progress here.  The also have a delicious looking eatery called the Windsor Station Pub.  If you are ever in Windsor, cleave to those locations.

P.S. Cleave is also a noun form of the word cleft. According to the OED, the first published use of the noun cleavage was in Time magazine’s August 1946 issue.  It was in reference to a trade term about the cut of an actress’s dress.

Auto-antonym

n. a word with multiple definitions, at least two of which directly contradict each other.

Simply put, one of the most fascinating things in the English language.  The same word, same spelling, same pronunciation, can mean the opposite of itself.  Mostly, this happens when a word has developed a new meaning over time.  Additionally, there are many words that seem like auto-antonyms if you use different prepositions with them, but I don’t think that really counts.  I’d love to give an example of one, but I’m going to hold off to give them their own entries.