User login
Adding a noun takes 30 seconds but it comes with a big responsibility. Once you add the noun, you own it on www.oppo-site.com.
You must take on board oppo-inions of others before linking to its opposite. If its opposite hasn't been added yet, you must add (and own) that too.
RSS feed
The Science of Opposites
The science of opposites where we aim to explore the opposite of every noun in the English language.
Nouns don't tend to have opposites - words like knife, pen, house, car and phone are somehow more complete when you find their logical partner.
Register and play your part in solving one of language's great mysteries. If we all do 1 noun each, we'll have this finished in no time.
Why don't I invert every attribute of the noun?
Nouns have many attributes (colour, shape, size etc.) which could be inverted in order find the opposite.
Early on in the study of opposites, certain nouns were found to be 'unstable' when multiple attributes.
An example:
Twitter: An online service enabling people to remain 'hyper connected' and communicate with each other, sharing thoughts, ideas and nonsense.
By inverting the attribute of hyper connected communication to silence, we come up with:
Online Trappist Monastery: A website that enables people to co-exist in silence and serenity. Everybody logs on and then looks at a blank screen, allowing their pupils to dilate until they drift of onto another mental plane.
If were were to invert the attribute of 'online' to 'offline' we would simply arrive at Trappist Monastery
Whilst both are valid opposites (one real, one hallucinated) it can be observed that the number of attributes selected for inversion affects the opposite.
Other caveats:
Double Negatives
It is possible to cause a 'double negative' opposite where a noun's purpose is inverted in a literal, word-for-word sense. Words such as do > don't, will > won't will often cause the researcher to arrive at false Prime opposites.
Context
A noun's purpose (and therefore opposite) must be considered within a given context. For example, mobile phones can be used to talk and send text messages. When defining the opposite, the context should be explained to avoid ambiguity.
Nouns within Nouns
Where a noun is part of the intrinsic purpose of another noun, it should not be inverted.
Roller Skate: To make it impossible for people to balance or walk without a high degree of practice. Once perfected, the Roller Skate enables people to glide along as though they were on wheels.
Its opposite, Friction Shoes (Footwear with high friction soles (e.g. with rubberised sandpaper suckers) that make the wearer's feet stick to the floor when walking. Believed to have been invented for Charlie Chaplin to run around corners.) has an intrinsic notion of 'Foot' in its definition. By inverting 'foot', the opposite becomes abstract and relies on the accurate resolution of 'foot' in the correct context to resolve Roller Skate.
