FtttG
User ID: 1175
There are many words in the English language which are formed using a prefix or a suffix, but for which the antonym formed by removing that prefix or suffix (or using the opposite prefix or suffix) is never used. There are even a handful of cases in which two compound words can be formed using a prefix and its antonymic prefix, but the word itself is never used in isolation, or has a vastly different meaning than would be inferred based on the meaning of the two compound words. Some examples:
- abuse, v. (antonym: disabuse): to affirm that another's belief is correct and not a misconception
- appointment, n. (antonym: disappointment): the state of feeling satisfied
- baseful, adj. (antonym: baseless): (of claims) with sound evidentiary backings
- concerting, adj. (antonym: disconcerting): tending to cause ease and comfort
- faultful, adj. (antonym: faultless): containing many imperfections
- feckful, adj. (antonym: feckless): purposeful, competent, effective
- gormful, adj. (antonym: gormless): sharp; intelligent; with his wits about him
- gruntled, adj. (antonym: disgruntled): content, satisfied
- gutful, adj. (antonym: gutless): brave, courageous
- hatful, adj. (antonym: hatless): the state of wearing a hat
- homeful, adj. (antonym: homeless): of a fixed abode
- inotic, adj. (antonym: exotic): indigenous, native
- interminate, v (antonym: exterminate): to commit mass suicide à la Jonestown
- interpret1, v. (antonym: misinterpret): to understand correctly and accurately
- jointed, adj. (antonym: disjointed): connected, coherent.
- parage, v. (antonym: disparage): to commend or praise.
- peerful, adj. (antonym: peerless): (of individuals) with many equals
- pitiful, adj.2 (antonym: pitiless): empathetic, caring
- rate, v.3 (antonyms: overrate, underrate): to assess the value of accurately
- react, v.4 (antonyms: overreact, underreact): to respond in an appropriate fashion
- reckful, adj. (antonym: reckless): cautious, careful
- ruthful, adj. (antonym: ruthless): scrupulous
- seamful, adj. (antonym: seamless): amateurishly put together
- spotful, adj. (antonym: spotless): dirty, disheveled
- substar, n. 5 (antonym: superstar): a minor celebrity; a B-, C- or Z-lister
- subvise, v. (antonym: supervise): to oversee ineffectually
- superstandard, adj. (antonym: substandard): in excess of requirements, superior
- timeful, adj. (antonym: timeless): bound to a particular era, a product of its time; an unintentional period piece
- tireful, adj. (antonym: tireless): prone to exhaustion, easily worn out
- topful, adj. (antonym: topless): decently clad
- underdose, n. v. (antonym: overdose): an insufficent dose
- underdraft, n. (antonym: overdraft): a positive bank balance
- underkill, n. (antonym: overkill): to use methods insufficient to accomplish one's goal
- undersee, v. (antonym: oversee): to supervise ineffectually; to ignore or forget about
- understay, v. (antonym: overstay): to cut one's residence short
- undertake, v.6 (antonym: overtake): to be overtaken by sb
- whelm, v. (antonyms: overwhelm, underwhelm): just the right amount, neither surplus nor insufficient to requirements
- witful, adj. (antonym: witless): intelligent, sensible
Can you think of any other good examples?
1 Obviously this word does see use on some occasions, and yet it isn't strictly an antonym for "misinterpret": "misinterpret" specifically denotes an inaccurate interpretation, whereas "interpret" is equivocal on whether the interpretation was accurate or not.
2 We move here into the realm of pedantry, as while this word does see use, it's not used as an antonym of "pitiless": rather, it denotes someone deserving of pity, which is more properly denoted by "pitiable". See also "nauseous"/"nauseated". In other cases people get this distinction right e.g. "contemptuous"/"contemptible".
3 See also "interpret": unlike "to overrate" and "to underrate", "to rate" does not pass judgement on whether the assessment was a fair or accurate one. Confusingly, "to rate" also carries a colloquial meaning of "to think highly of, to commend"; when Roy Keane said of Mick McCarthy, "... I didn't rate you as a player, I don't rate you as a manager, and I don't rate you as a person..." he meant that he didn't think highly of him in any of these capacities. This runs contrary to the word's usual meaning of "to assess", which includes both positive and negative assessments.
4 See also "rate".
5 There was a British comedian (it might have been Lee Evans) who once quipped that every actor who appears in a porn film is denoted a porn star, which is not the standard we apply to actors in general, only a minority of whom can be called "stars". "Where are all the porn actors?"
6 As distinct of its meaning "to undertake a task".
FtttG
3d ago
This report from 2021 claims that trans people are over four times more likely than cis people to experience violent victimisation, based on data from the 2017 and 2018 National Crime Victimisation Surveys. As it's based on survey data rather than police reports, the usual caveats apply.
FtttG
3d ago
FtttG
3d ago
Ziz echoed a lot of these talking points during his arraignment yesterday.
It probably didn't help his case that when asked to state his date of birth for the record, he replied that he had been born many times.
FtttG
3d ago
I noticed something peculiar this evening. In the coming weeks there's meant to be a protest against what's euphemistically called "gender-based violence", and there have been posters dotted around the city advertising the protest in question. Curiously, the posters are bilingual, half of them solely in English and the other half solely in Spanish (even though I'd hazard a guess there are more Portuguese speakers in Dublin than Spanish). The English-language posters refer to a protest against "gender-based violence", whereas the Spanish-language posters don't beat around the bush and refer to a protest against "violence against women".
I guess Spanish-speaking feminists haven't totally ceded all territory to the Ts.
FtttG
3d ago
It is pretty striking how high a proportion of the victims are Black.
I presume it tracks the murder rate by ethnicity among US population as a whole.
FtttG
3d ago
Liara Tsai, “a 35-year-old white transgender woman”. Body found in crashed car, ex-girlfriend (who, again, likely has mental health issues) was convicted for the stabbing.
In at least this case (and probably several others), the perpetrator was also trans, which in a sane world would rule out "anti-trans animus" as a motive:
An autopsy determined that Tsai died from multiple sharp-force injuries, though it’s unclear when she died. Lewis, an acquaintance of Tsai’s who was visiting her from Boston, has been taken into custody in Olmstead County and charged with a felony count of interfering with a dead body and second degree murder, according to local outlet KTTC. Olmstead County Sheriff Kevin Torgerson told MPR that there was no indication that the killing was motivated by anti-trans bias, as Lewis is also trans.
About one-fifth of the way through Cryptonomicon. The setting and tone make me want to re-read Catch-22, which I last read over a decade ago.
I watched a few episodes of The Sopranos and it didn't really grab me, just seemed like Goodfellas fanfic, a reaction unaided by the huge overlap in the respective works' casts (David Chase even originally intended to cast Ray Liotta as Tony).
I only got around to watching season 1 of The Wire earlier this year, and while it's definitely a slow burn and the huge cast of characters can make plotlines difficult to follow at times, I can confirm that it lives up to the hype. Watching season 2 as we speak.
I was so powerfully underwhelmed by Breaking Bad that I have zero interest in watching anything else Gilligan is involved in. I was intrigued by a column suggesting Pluribus can be read as a metaphor for the Great Awokening, but watching a show I don't enjoy just because I agree with the underlying politics is pretty antithetical to the way I consume media. Weird to think that the entire life cycle of this generation of wokeness – initiation, peak and recession – all took place since the Breaking Bad finale.
FtttG
7d ago
there has been a curious rush to publicize that the offender was a second or third generation immigrant, usually a British citizen. This is apparently motivated from a desire to push back against anti-migrant sentiment: "See! He grew up in the UK. He wasn't an immigrant! You can't hold this terrible event against immigrants".
I suppose the argument makes a certain amount of sense if you're operating from a tabula rasa, nurture-over-nature perspective. If we're all blank slates with no predisposition towards violence or criminality, it stands to reason that any crime committed by a person raised in Britain logically points to a deficiency in British culture.
What I find frustrating is that very few woke or progressive people actually believe that we're all blank slates who are entirely the product of our social environments, a view which obviously contradicts the claim that sexuality is innate and that everyone has an innate "gender identity" knowable only to themselves.
Right, so ultimately all they really want is a maximally redistributive (read: socialist) state, in which the police force will wither away and become unnecessary. (Even if they rarely say so in so many words, acutely aware that people will look at them like they have two heads.) Kind of makes me wonder why they even bother criticising the police when their only actual beef is with capitalism.
FtttG
8d ago
As I pointed out a few weeks ago, the underlying flaw in these debates is that what progressives want from a police force (assuming they want a police force at all) is fundamentally incoherent.
Either the police can adopt an aggressive, proactive and hands-on approach to policing African-American (and Hispanic, to a lesser extent) communities, which means more COCs (criminals of colour) getting shot and/or being sent to prison; or they can adopt a hands-off, laissez-faire approach, which means more people of colour getting victimised by the criminals in their communities. There's pretty much no way for police officers to cut down on the rate of violent crime in a community without arresting the perpetrators, and there's no way for police officers to be more hands-off without a huge spike in crime victimisation.
I'd like to believe there's some hypothetical point on the thermostat that would keep the majority of progressive activists happy most of the time, but it's hard to envision what this might look like. American progressives have been complaining about over- and under-policing in black American communities for as long as I've been alive, and indeed many decades prior.
FtttG
8d ago
No, it's not the same thing. But it's the same kind of weird deflection. What makes you think the most effective means of combatting anti-immigration sentiment is to point out that the perpetrator of a horrific violent crime was a legal immigrant? That's even worse than if it was committed by a refugee or asylum seeker!
Yeah. I'm similarly baffled when I see people mentioning that the perpetrator of the latest mass stabbing incident was a British (or in one case, Irish) citizen (by which they mean someone who secured citizenship as an adult), like they're laying down a trump card.
So you mean our processes for immigration and naturalisation are so lacking that they can completely fail to identify and weed out a deranged knife-wielding lunatic (never mind a garden-variety rapist or thief)? Way to tell on yourself.
FtttG
8d ago
It would be interesting to find out what proportion of these murders were committed by first-generation migrants.
FtttG
8d ago
I've tried to think of ways to take advantage of my appearance
Go into sales?
FtttG
8d ago
The unserious gotcha is that I am skeptical of this kind of "strong revealed preference" argument, because you might say the same about doing heroin.
Why are you sceptical? Many people who do heroin do so more than once, from which we can infer that they have a strong revealed preference for doing heroin. Many women who have one child have more than one, from which we can make the same inference.
FtttG
8d ago
There is at the very least no reason, by your logic, why confirmed lesbians and asexuals couldn't be allowed to serve.
I'm confused by the implication that being a lesbian or asexual means you don't want to be a mother, or can't find fulfilment by so doing. Many lesbians get pregnant via sperm donor.
A few weeks ago my girlfriend was on Instagram and found a reel of a group of women (and one man) respectively cosplaying as the Bubble Head Nurses and Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2. I mentioned that the game is really good and we could try playing it together if she liked, a suggestion she responded to with enthusiasm, despite not really being a gamer.
I have a complicated relationship with Silent Hill 2. I was aware of the franchise (and I think even played the demo for Silent Hill 3 as a child, without having played either of the previous two instalments, only to find that my PC couldn't hack it), but the first time I encountered the idea that Silent Hill 2 specifically was a game with real artistic merit was from hearing Yahtzee relentlessly gush about it. Curiosity piqued, about fifteen years ago I bought a secondhand PS2 and a copy of the game and gave it a whirl, only to give up on it an hour or two in. The same thing happened on my second attempt. On probably my third attempt I decided to just power through it and made it to the Brookhaven Hospital — at which point it finally clicked for me, and I played all the way through to the end. I played it through to the ending a second time, and haven't touched it since.
With my PS2 gathering dust somewhere, I installed the PC port of the original game* which is apparently abandonware, along with the "Enhanced Edition" mod, which optimises the experience for modern PCs and enables controller support. We booted up the game and got stuck in, with my girlfriend playing until she got too scared and then asking me to take over. I don't scare easily, and even on the times I've played the game to the end generally found it more creepy and unsettling than outright scary. My girlfriend scares much easier than I do, and after subjecting to innumerable scary movies over the years, I can say without exaggeration that Silent Hill 2 was the most scared I've ever seen her: she was literally shrieking in terror in places, and mentioned having had nightmares about Pyramid Head. In much the same way that comedy films can seem funnier when watched with a group, playing a horror game with someone sitting next to you who's frightened out of her wits really enhanced the experience, and I found the game scarier and more unnerving than any previous playthrough. By the time you've emerged from the Historical Society and are making the lonesome voyage across the lake, the game has become utterly hypnotic.And then you get to the ending, and the game turns on a dime from scaring the bejesus out of you to breaking your heart. We were both devastated when it's implied Angela kills herself, the twist of how Mary died came as a complete surprise to my girlfriend, and when Mary reads out her letter to James at the end we were both sobbing.
In some ways my opinion of the game hasn't changed: almost everything prior to the Brookhaven Hospital remains a boring slog through a set of bland, repetitive environments. (Maybe that's necessary to lull the players into a false sense of security so they can pull the rug out from under them later, modulating from survival to psychological horror.) The titular town is terrifying at nighttime but dull as dishwater during the day, fog notwithstanding. The transition from in-game cutscenes to pre-rendered cinematics might be the only thing that really dates the game to the early 2000s, as it's a trope that completely fell out of favour once graphical fidelity hit some floor. In other ways I'm surprised to admit that I get it now: the people claiming that the dodgy voice acting and imprecise facial animation contribute to the game's dreamlike Lynchian atmosphere sounds like pure cope — but goddamn it, those things do contribute to the game's dreamlike Lynchian atmosphere, whether intended by the creators or not. (Part of me even wants to call the game a spiritual adaptation of Mulholland Drive, given that both stories are fundamentally aboutthe psychological coping mechanisms their sympathetic protagonists resort to in order to avoid confronting the fact that they have murdered their loved ones; maybe the Man Behind Winkie's serves the same purpose as Pyramid Head? — and yet it couldn't be, because it came out only four months after Mulholland Drive debuted at Cannes. That's how far ahead of the curve Team Silent were: they were making Lynchian games before Lynchian games were a thing, without even having the man's masterpiece to crib from.) Since Silent Hill 2's release, there have been dozens of video games since which marketed themselves as "psychological horror", and yet I can't remember any which came close to getting so deep under my skin. In a medium in which "mature" or "adult" is still widely seen as synonymous with more cursing and more realistic gore and tits (or including these elements, but rapping the player on the knuckles for daring to enjoy them), Silent Hill 2 actually feels like a story for grown-ups in a way that most games that have been released ten, fifteen or twenty years later couldn't hold a candle to. I recall when Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy came out, some critic made the comparison that Grand Theft Auto is a game which, owing to its content, should only be played by adults, whereas Fahrenheit is a game for adults. With all due respect: bullshit. David Cage wishes he could craft something half this mature and powerful, and twenty years after Fahrenheit came out he doesn't appear to have come a millimetre closer.
Roger Ebert once said that, for him, cinema is first and foremost an emotional medium: he dislikes films that delve into intellectual debates, considering it a misuse of the form. I tend to agree: I can't remember a film I loved specifically because it made me think (although it may have done so incidentally). By contrast, despite video games' strenuous efforts to replicate the visual iconography of cinema, I've long thought the medium they most resemble is actually books, in the sense that they are long-form storytelling media the consumer must actively engage with to move the story forward, unlike passively consumed movies or TV shows. It is for this reason that I've long considered games more compelling from an intellectual standpoint than an emotional one, which makes sense when you consider that even getting to grips with the game mechanics is, to a greater or lesser extent, a fundamentally intellectual exercise: most of the games I've loved, I've loved because they made me think, not because they made me feel (e.g. Metal Gear Solid 2, Spec Ops The Line, SOMA: they all made me feel emotions a little bit, but the main reason I loved them was because they made me think). But I now think Silent Hill 2 might be the exception to this trend. Having now completed my third playthrough, I think it might be the most unsettling, moving, emotionally affecting video game I've ever played, bar none.
gushing over
I've become vastly fussier as a gamer in my advancing years. Last night I wanted to play something by myself, so I played the first half-hour of Trek to Yomi. Gorgeous to look at and I like that the spoken dialogue is in Japanese, but the gameplay was already starting to feel a bit rote and repetitive, so I gave up on it. Next I tried Advent Rising, notable for having its story co-written by Orson Scott Card. Gave up on that even quicker, inside of ten minutes.
A few years ago I tried playing Undertale after the world and its mother were raving about it. I think I played it for about two hours and remember enjoying it, but for some reason I never got around to finishing it. Last night I took another crack at it, playing about as far as the title card (i.e. the game held my attention for significantly longer than the previous two games I tried that evening). It's rare for a game to make me laugh out loud, or to make me think "aww, how sweet", so props to the game for doing both. Will see if I can manage to make it to the end this time.
*No remake for me, thank you very much.
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