Newspeak, subtlety and opposites
When I was in college, a friend once accused me of being antagonistic—in other words, of just wanting to argue against any claim that I heard. I didn’t think he was right, but I remember, with great clarity, the logical bind he put me in: if I argued against his charge I confirmed it. It was an instructive moment. I had the language nerd’s tendency to think of rhetoric and vocabulary as infinitely flexible, and my friend had made me notice one of the many ways in which that’s not true. There are some charges that can’t be effectively argued against.
My kids have furthered that education with their own questions about language and how it’s used, such as “what’s the opposite of broccoli?” Again, the incident flagged up a gap in my own understanding of how concepts are related to one another.
Some concepts are symmetrical and exist in relation to one another. Think of honorable and dishonorable, or strong and weak.
Some concepts can’t be argued against. That’s the “antagonistic” example above.
Some are things in their own right, without an opposite (broccoli, and in fact most concrete nouns)
Furthermore, some seem at first to have an opposite, but reveal complexities when you look closely. Think of true and false. These are not linked in the same way that honorable/dishonorable are; they do not simply denote having or lacking a quality. A true thing is something true in fact and intent, whereas a lie can lack either or both of those components. As I wrote years ago, there are dishonest truths but there aren’t honest lies; that symmetry is lacking. So the opposite of “lie” is not simply “truth”. I’d say the opposite of lie is grace—a mindset of acceptance and forbearance rather than antagonism and deception. I think that grappling with these sorts of subtle pairs of concepts is one of the great strengths in language, both to help us express complicated thoughts and to help us have those thoughts in the first place.
George Orwell understood this when he invented the ugly, easy, reductive Newspeak for his novel Nineteen Eighty Four. One of the aims of that language was to reduce nuance and the range of possible meanings, and one of the relevant mechanisms was that any word “could be negatived by adding the affix un- […] Given, for instance, the word good, there was no need for such a word as bad, since the required meaning was equally well — indeed, better — expressed by ungood.” That “indeed, better” shows a great depth of understanding. Orwell conceived of a dystopian vocabulary where each word was ugly, simple, easy to pronounce and expressed one clear, preapproved idea. May we keep room in our language for subtler shades than these.