The face of words

A road less traveled by, my concern is to make the common negative view of contradictions stand on its head and to suggest that contradictions breed creativity—rescinding what we had been taught in our greenness years. What is a contradiction, anyway? I explore contradictions in a smattering of novels and Power Elites speeches—2012 to 2021—to make them visible. Aiming for contradictions, I found them as I came on a trailblazing vision of one of their offshoots, the liminal chameleon contronym—a compact of a single word admitting of two senses that contradict each other. The latter being the epitome of contradiction, what’s better than a contradiction that doesn’t look like one? I crafted a lexicon of 340 English contronyms culled from dedicated sites. Then ran the lexicon on stories to ensure the lexicon did what I made it to do. Contronyms being no ends in themselves, rather means to an end, I probed Power Elites speeches through the lexicon filter. Contradictions call to mind a future result gained by a serious try—we speak with a purpose. So, I completed the contronym index with McClelland’s 1987 need for achievement (nAch) index and Roget’s Future Time index. Then set the contronym lexicon in a text analysis package to tag these innocuous contradictions woven through texts. That texts could be meetings of opposites is not unusual. The stroke of luck that whetted my curiosity was to reveal that, more often than not, the rates of these opposites were not stationary, depending on what the records were about or who spoke. That changed everything. Speeches were by Xi Jinping, V. Putin, J. Powell, M. Draghi, C. Lagarde, among others. All in all, blurring our certainties, contronyms expand the limits of what language may seize.