#199 words

[miserychick-blog]

Conspiracies

Less often on some nights, I slip back into old sleeping habits. I find it to be considerably worse when sober.

We sat with white blankets covering our legs, talking about conspiracies. My blanket was smaller and smelt rough. I kept my shoes on underneath it.

"I think the government made up ‘selfies’ to concoct a system of face recognition for the general public." I announce.

"My phone is listening to me…" He stared at the screen and not at me.

"North Korea doesn’t actually exist either, you know. It’s fabricated, or at least largely exaggerated. So we all think we haven’t really got it so bad in comparison. Then, then they can do whatever they like with us."

"Oh, yeah? Look." He thrusts the phone at me. "See, knuckle dusters, there in the advert. I was talking about them before. I said, they hurt you more than the other person, and my phone heard me. I don’t like it." He said, picking up his iPad instead.

I thought about holding a glass of cold wine and listened to Liam Neeson speak about maps in the background until I struggled to hold my head up. Until I dreamt of nothing.

[twowug]

When I Last LEFT (departed) My Journal, I Had a Lot of Entries LEFT (remaining) To Do

Wowie zowie, I just learned about contronyms (also called antagonyms). Looking back at the previous post, 'dust' is a great example of a contronym--a word that is its own opposite.

From this list, I also found many other words that are contronyms: left, resign, fast, fight with, etc.

I wonder if some of these words formed opposite meanings because they originated from different languages or formed in different ways?

I imagine the contradiction of 'resign' (quit) and 'resign' (sign up) occurred as a result of adding the morpheme '-re' to the verb 'sign' to get the 'sign up' definition, whereas 'resign' as in 'quit' probably came about quite differently. Evidence of this is found in the different pronunciations and syllable stresses for the word. Most of the words on the list are pronounced the same and have the same stress regardless of meaning.

I notice a lot of contronyms on the list are prepositions, including 'fight with.' 'With' can mean either 'along' or 'against' depending on context. 'Up' and 'out' made the list in a number of places, such as with 'hold up' and 'out of.' Prepositions are polysemous, so it is not bizarre so many make up contronyms.

[stareandwrite]

I see flesh — bare flesh, 200 yards on, as my dog and I run along the winter beach. So much skin makes no sense for 45 degrees Fahrenheit. But there she is. The path will bring us closer and closer until we run right by her. Each stride delivers news: she might be topless; she's definitely topless; she's improbably trapezoidal in the torso; she's a he; he's so thoroughly un-androgynous that only prehistoric, hardwired, propagate-the-species optimism can account for my initial impulse to assign gender to a speck. The guy is with a second guy, also undressed for July. As my dog and I pass, I miss all details of the men. I do a quadruple take on a ruby hookah in the sand between them. When men and hookah are a couple dozen steps behind me, the Rushdie audiobook in my headphones says "few boatmen or traders invited him to share a hookah." Come on, I think. It's time to double back. I see upcountry choo-choo puffs rise from the hookah. I see the summer-ready men. Ham-handed reality commandeers the audiobook, making it say "the defining images of the coming of spring."

- me on Friday in Seattle

The Rushdie novel mentioned in the post is Midnight's Children. The quoted passages, which happened to come out of my headphones exactly as described above, are from pages 9 and 10, respectively, of the 2006 Random House Trade Paperbacks edition that I searched online to get the wording right.

[stareandwrite]

No one looks up from their hands, phones, papers. Yau Ma Tei and the crush grows tighter. Women with lollypops reading “stop” try half-heartedly to stop more than a few entering the train, but stiffen amid the futility, arm and sign raised before the door. People press in around and the doors close to the familiar refrain, “ please stand back from the closing door” spoken in Cantonese, Mandarin and English. Now the train gathers speed again, people swaying with the carriage rhythm, no longer space to hold on, propped by other bodies. No one looks, no one catches anyone’s eye. The discomfort of proximity precludes any further connection; the space too close for contact. Jordan, and no one exits, more join the fray. Can this press be any tighter we all wonder but don’t complain? It’s just before nine and the worst of the rush. A girl next to me, bundled against the Hong Kong cold, types into her smart phone, expressionless. It’s too early for emotion, there’s no mental space for emotion. The man next to me coughs, whether in need or to create any distance around him. To the best of their abilities, people turn away...

- Lisa Genasci in Hong Kong

Many thanks to Lisa. Her dispatch from the crush of Hong Kong's morning commute is the first-ever submission of original work to this blog. I'm delighted and look forward to more from her and the rest of you. It's just 200 words. Actually, 199 in Lisa's case. Please submit here. Thank you.