Words, words, words

[...]... words are coined because an acute need is felt, but a common objection to coinages and adoptions is that they are synonyms for perfectly good words already in the language. It is rare, however, to find perfect and complete synonyms. The most one can usually say is that there are contexts which will admit a choice of two or even three possible words without noticeable difference of meaning. For example, the rainfall in April was exceptional or the rainfall in April was abnormal. These examples may give us grounds for saying that exceptional and abnor­mal are synonymous in certain contexts — butwe do cer­tainly need to add that qualification. Applied to people, these adjectives are by no means synonymous, as we may see by comparing My son is exceptional and My son is abnormal.

Like synonyms, perfect and complete antonyms are fairly rare. It is true that languages seem to offer fairly ‘naturally’ a large measure of polarisation, but it is usual to find the antonymous polarity restricted to certain contexts. Thus thick is only one antonym of thin (‘a thin slice’ — ‘a thick slice’); another is fat (‘a thin man’ — ‘a fat man’). The opposite of peculiar in It is a custom peculiar to some countries is common; but the opposite of he has peculiar tastes is not he has common tastes but he has average tastes.

There is one other important factor which interferes with the simple opposition of antonyms. In dealing with grammar, it is often useful to see some contrasts in terms of ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ members. Thus love and loved are in contrast as ‘present’ and ‘past’, but only the latter is actually ‘marked’ as such; love is ‘unmarked’ and as such may be much more widely used than merely as a present in contrast with loved. In Penguins live in the Antarctic, live is so to speak ‘tenseless’, since the statement is true not merely for the present but for the past and (presumably) the future. Similarly in vocabulary, man — woman, lion — lioness are in contrast, with the second member of each pair morphologically ‘marked’, and we find that we can frequently use the first member (the unmark­ed one) to subsume the second but not vice versa. ‘There is a lion in this cage’ does not exclude the possibility that it may be a lioness, but ‘There is a lioness in this cage’ is specific. So too we may speak of ‘man or beast’ and not exclude women: ‘so long as men can breathe or eyes can see’.

The notion can obviously be extended to pairs in which there is no actual morphological marking by morphemes like -ed or -ess. Although horse in some contexts may be in contrast with mare, horse can often be used to include mares, as geese can include ganders. In this respect, horse and goose may be thought of as ‘unmarked’ members of a contrast. So too with many adjectives. We may agree that old and young are antonyms, as are light and heavy, big and small, short and tall. But in each of these pairs, one member is ‘unmarked’, as can be seen in the fact that we can ask How old is the baby? or How tall is your fence? with­out implying that the one is old or the other tall. It is the lack of antonymous mark which enables us also to say It is three feet high and the like.

Here again, in fact, we find ourselves able to speak about a word’s value only when we have it in a context in actual use. It is a fatuous exercise to give synonyms or antonyms for words in isolation and it is impossible to answer the question What does the word ‘love’ mean? in isolation. The word is used ‘correctly’ but quite differently in I love my wife, Brotherly love, I love ice cream, Love all mankind! and The score is love — all. If therefore we cannot say what the meaning of a word is until it is put into an adequate context, we should beware of thinking that the meaning resides in the word itself: it is rather spread over the word and the neighbouring words, because only the latter identify the ‘semantic field’, the group of relevant associations, in which we have contrasting words by which to measure the one used. In one semantic field, for instance, rose operates in contrast with tulip and dahlia; in another, it is in contrast with red and purple. That use of put out which is in the semantic field of ‘fire’ allows extinguish as a synonym; but in the field of broadcastings we would not say that the BBC had extinguished the news item that we have just heard on the radio. And in still another field, one does not extinguish the cat before going to bed. [...]