Cleavage, Auto-antonyms, and Non-Contradiction

Once, I used a sentence that had the word “cleave”, and a commenter said she liked the word. Now, of course, I too like the word “cleave,” because it is more-often than not a prelude to two breasts—“cleavage”—and what is there to hate about a pair of coy, and sexily-shy breasts? But “cleave,” unfortunately, means two things: to take apart, and to put together. It cleaves the girlbossom into two, and then one’s tongue cleaves to the roof of one’s mouth. Two opposite meanings, one word. Or, for that matter, “Dust that table” should mean “put dust on the table,” just as much as it should mean “beat the dust off that table.” Auto-antonyms, they call them. If nothing else, they teach us that humans are not computers. There is no way to express such sentences in Boolean (computer) logic, in all its variants. But humans do it all the time. Humans are hot, man; humans are cool. The bigger lesson, of course, is that humans generally don’t mean contradictions when they affirm things that seem so; often it is a category error on the part of their critic. Yes, they can contradict themselves by claiming that they hold to axioms that, in fact, they do not (as evidenced by their failure to be consistent with those axioms); but they do not hold contradictory axioms. So, when I criticise an atheist’s inconsistency, I’m saying that his axioms forbid his calling himself an atheist, seeing as he doesn’t follow the implications of his creed to their logical end (which would entail, among other things, not believing in love, hope, distress, or the like, for example). Since he is calling himself and atheist, he is lying—the gentle name of which is “inconsistency.” Comments: 0