Line Break - A review of Steins;Gate (Anime)

All of the posts on my blog so far have basically amounted to lessons in English Language. While I'm very proud of them, and they were extremely fun to do, in the interests of diversifying my writing I'm dedicating some time to different styles and genres. Today, I'm presenting my take on a review. I'm hesitant to write a review, because writing one implies you have some authority on the matter, and I have very little authority on any matter. However, I really enjoy Digibro's YouTube reviews of anime, and I hope I've learned enough from them to be able to pull off a review of Steins;Gate that has some relevance.

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Steins;Gate, to summarise in a sentence, is a fantastic story which I would be extremely hesitant to show to my friends. At the centre of the show is an amazingly well-crafted story that deals with interesting themes, but the surrounding shell of this metaphorical éclair is so heavily influenced by a very particular Japanese/anime culture that it's a bitter pill to swallow, and is as difficult to digest as this metaphor is to follow.

To put a swift end to the food metaphors, Steins;Gate is an anime that concerns time-travel, though, much like 'The Girl Who Leapt Through Time', it's not overtly sci-fi. Other than the obvious emphasis on temporal manipulation, the show is set in a more-or-less realistic depiction of Akihabara, a Tokyo district famed for it's electrical goods and Otaku culture. It's the implications of this setting that make it difficult for me to recommend this show to those who are not already fans of anime: those who are will probably have already made their minds up about the show, and those who are not will likely feel alienated by a culture that is perceived as abnormal and perhaps even a little creepy. 

Is it a vibrant and colourful room that displays a man's passion for a subject, or an abstruse obsession that borders being perverse?

Should I be encouraging the embracing of Otaku culture? I'm not sure. For those not aware, 'Otaku' is the Japanese word to describe someone with an obsessive interest, and while it can be used to describe any such pursuit, anime and manga are the normal haunts of an Otaku (with other interests usually being defined in the term, i.e, 'gun Otaku'.) Obsession is not necessarily a bad thing, and most self-described Otaku's, like most self-described anything's, are using the term hyperbolically, 'Otaku' is to 'anime' as 'gamer' is to 'game'.

Tangents aside, Steins;Gate most definitely embraces the Otaku culture. The character Daru is somewhat of a lecherous, perverted Otaku that claims the anime and manga girls that he fawns over are his 'wives'. It's mostly played for laughs, and the anime definitely knows when to downplay these light-hearted, stranger moments, but it also makes the show much less accessible to those not familiar with it. However, if you're willing to look past some of the strangeness, I think there's definitely a fantastic story here that anyone, anime-lovers or not, can really enjoy.

The show starts with a cold open; some profound sounding monologue from the main character that at first comes across as a bit pretentious, but in time it should become apparent that the main character is just trying to sound important, living out a fantasy of being some secret agent for an underground organisation. Through repeatedly calling attention to Okabe's delusions in this way, the series seems to be saying, "this is the real world, things like this do not happen", which makes the later time-travel scenes seem all the more impressive. There really is this sense of weight in the character's discovery/invention of a time machine, as though this really is ground-breaking because there's nothing to suggest that this mad science is the norm. In that sense, Steins;Gate is an incredibly tight anime, it knows it's themes and ideas and sticks to them well.

Things are intentionally vague and obscure at first. The main characters (Okabe Rintaro - a self-proclaimed mad scientist - and his childhood friend Mayuri Shiina) attend a lecture on time-travel, and after some weird scenes that either confuse the audience or appear not to make any logical sense, a character only just introduced as Kurisu Makise lies dead in a pool of blood. This is at the 8 minute mark, Then some more weirdness that leaves even the main character confused, and then a satellite crashes into the building Okabe and Mayuri were just in,

It's at this point that, for the first time, the opening of the anime plays. As a general rule of thumb, I tend to dislike anime openings for their tendency to somewhat ruin the plot of the show. Very often this is done by introducing many of the characters in a very short space of time, this can be incredibly frustrating, especially in a short series, as the characters are introduced into the plot at certain times for particular reasons. It can also negatively impact the reveal of a character's importance, a character that usually slips into the background, for example, can immediately be recognised as important to the viewer due to their inclusion in the opening. Steins;Gate, despite it's interesting visuals and good music, is a terrible offender of this, including every important character (possibly bar one) in it's opening cinematic. I would personally recommend skipping the intro, though this is made harder by having it play one third of the way into the first episode, but this is a pretty minute detail that largely won't affect anyone's enjoyment of the anime.

In contrast to the fast pace of the first 8 minutes, the first time I watched through Steins;Gate I felt like the plot was plodding along at a frustratingly slow rate, with reveals shrinking in comparison to the inevitable discovery of the time machine. However, looking back I think this was short-sighted of me. I had assumed that the plot revolved around the time machine, and what sort of hijinks Okabe and co. would be getting up to in it. However, the plot is rather less bombastic than that, despite the presentation. Through the setting of a tiny apartment (stemming from the anime's origin as a Japanese visual novel game) which can almost start to feel claustrophobic, the wider scope of the plot that is eventually revealed begins to seem overwhelming, and I could have nothing but empathy for the characters as they begin to realise the magnitude of the situation that they are in. 

The apex of the show, therefore, is incredibly emotional. Dramatic tension builds as what appears to be the 'true' plot unravels. It also rewards astute viewers, allowing the audience to make the connections between past events that seemed trivial or confusing at first, and seeing how they relate to the current storyline, though these are later explained in more depth for those that were too absorbed in the story to have noticed. Had this show been a BBC drama, forums would have been rife with speculation, but as it stands the anime was released into a world where anyone could know the entire plot with a simple Google search - being an anime adaptation of a video game will have that effect.

At just 24 episodes long, Steins;Gate is deliciously short in the way that my favourite shows are. Easily bingeable on Netflix or DVD in a couple of days, or more regularly consumed over a week or two. There's also a special 25th episode (known as an OVA or Original Video Animation, the Direct-to-DVD of Japanese entertainment) which, to some degree, ties up the plot and gives the audience a chance to spend an extra 20 minutes with the characters that we've come to love throughout the series. While I wasn't a fan of the way in which it did advance the plot, as minimally as it did so, I can see how it would fulfil a certain craving of people to see more of the show, and to have a sort of epilogue and know how people's lives have been affected by the preceding episodes. 

At it's heart, Steins;Gate is a thriller that balances never-hilarious but oft amusing humour with a fantastic, character-driven story. It's a show about the relationships between the characters, and emotions we can all relate to, that uses time-travel as a vehicle for its plot. Because of this, I hesitate to ascribe the anime the 'sci-fi' moniker. I wouldn't want a reader to be put off by images of lightsabers and laser guns, or even Doctor Who-style aliens. Truly, Steins;Gate is an anime for anyone that would enjoy a Tarantino or a Hitchcock, and I think it could serve as a fantastic introduction to the medium for any lover of thrillers, just so long as they can get along with, or get past, some of the very Japanese humour. 

Steins;Gate is available to stream on Netflix (sadly they're not paying me to advertise for them), or can be purchased in full on both DVD and Blu-Ray, such as from Amazon.

Collateral Damage 2 (this time, it's adjectival)

I'm beginning to think it would be extremely remiss of me to not name drop at the beginning of a blog post. Recently I've given Izzy not nearly so much linkage as she deserves but more than anyone else on my blog, and thattoryboy has gotten a mention alongside leftwingtendencies, so it only seems fair that I should cite Oliver as the inspiration for this blog post. Oliver doesn't have a blog though (as far as I'm aware anyway, I mean, I didn't ask or anything) so I'll just link to the two League of Legends YouTube videos he's posted to his channel: It's Mostly Skill and Insanely Average Vel'Koz. Oliver used to upload videos of himself playing guitar to YouTube, but I suppose he decided that being cool just wasn't for him.

This is an incredibly indirect way of introducing the topic of collateral adjectives. Oliver told me about them in a Skype conversation, and now I've been slightly fascinated by them.

So what is a collateral adjective? To put it as simply as I think I can, it's a word that describes a noun (as all adjectives do) but does not share the same root as it. Examples make this much easier to understand. Something relating to the moon is 'lunar' and something relating to the sun is 'solar'. Note how the nouns and the adjectives don't have the same root?

Many adjectives are not like this, and are formed just by editing the noun, usually attaching a suffix like -ly such as in 'badly' or 'quickly'. Because of this they are called 'derived' adjectives. These are much easier to understand, as long as you know what the noun means you'll know what the adjective is referring to, and everything is fine.

But they're just not as cool as collateral adjectives. There's something special about the English language's wild appropriation of other languages that makes it what it is. 'Moon' itself comes from the Anglo-Saxon 'mōna' and 'lunar' comes from the Latin 'luna'. They both mean the same thing, but for some reason we decided to use the Latin as an adjective despite it so rightly being a noun (Luna is the ancient Roman Goddess of the moon alongside Juno and Diana). 

I had intended to place a picture of the Roman Goddess Diana here, but Diana has a tendency to display at least one of her breasts. I'm trying to be mostly family friendly here, so I've went for the more fully clothed Juno instead.

The reason for why they're in our language probably isn't important. We all know that English is the kleptomaniac of languages, generously 'adopting' (read, 'stealing') anything that looks useful, much like it's speakers did with two thirds of the world. However, they're here and they're probably here to stay, and they have some quite interesting features.

Firstly, there are many adjectives that have both denominal (another word for derived adjectives) and collateral forms. Inexplicably 'father' is a popular example of such a word, with both 'fatherly' and 'paternal' relating to a Dad, perhaps the patriarchy at work once again. 'Womanly' is also mirrored by 'feminine' while 'motherly' would be 'maternal', I mention these for both the cause of gender equality and because they're useful examples. To stick to the family theme, 'child' has several examples of both derived and collateral adjectives: 'Childlike' and 'childish' both prove that derived adjectives do not need the suffix -ly, while 'infantile', 'puerile', and 'juvenile' show that, at least in the world of collateral adjectives, it really is all about the younger generation. 

Secondly, they're very useful in writing. The English Language is a mass of synonyms, each having somewhat different connotations that we can leverage in both fiction and non-fiction. As DailyWritingTips.com notes, "Collateral adjectives are often the preferred choice only in formal, ironic, or humorously pedantic usage, but they are helpful because superficially synonymic adjectives may have different senses (for example, daily and diurnal have different meanings)." I'm not one to analyse humour too heavily, but there is something uniquely charming about the emphasis that collateral adjectives place on their subjects. Compare Iago's insult of 'lascivious Moor' against Othello in Shakespeare's iconic play to the modern day equivalent of 'lustful'. Complex words make a definite impression on us, even if that impression is, "Look at how up themselves they are."

I love Emilia's pointing here. She makes Othello look like a puppy that has just ripped up someone's slippers.

It's also fun (for someone like me) to quiz yourself on them. I'll finish up this blog post with a collection of 10 collateral adjectives, ask yourself if you know the nouns that they are linked to and I'll put a link to the Wiktionary page so you can check to see if you were right. If you're feeling really sporting, grab a piece of paper and write down your answers, record your score, and let me know how you did. 

1. Ecclesiastical
2. Ursine
3. Avuncular
4. Oleic
5. Brumous
6. Terpsichorean
7. Papilionaceous
8. Genteel
9. Cruciverbal
10. Specular

Check your answers!

Mondegreens, Malapropisms, Eggcorns and More!

The wonderful Izzy informed me this morning that eggcorns were being discussed on BBC Radio 1 this morning. She seemed very excited that something I'd written about popped up on her favourite radio station just a day and a bit later, and the news certainly put a smile on my face at half past seven in the morning, which is otherwise difficult to do as I'm usually asleep.

Of course, the only explanation is that Grimmy is secretly a massive fan of my blog. Or is there something else going on here? The answer to that question is probably yes, this is probably just a coincidence. But it could also be an example of 'The Baader-Meinhof Effect'. This is the phenomenon in which a word or phrase which one has only recently heard or learned about suddenly seems to appear with uncanny frequency. I'm sure it's happened to us all, and it's an example of what's called a 'cognitive bias' which are essentially thoughts that make our brain irrational and often impair our judgement. A classic example of a cognitive bias is 'The Gambler's Fallacy' in which it is believed that a run of bad luck is sure to be followed by something good (or the inverse) when in reality, this is not how probability works. DamnInteresting.com has an article on Baader-Meinhof which says more than I probably could about it, so I'd encourage you to read that if you're looking for more on that topic.

So it's possible that Izzy's life has been surrounded by eggcorns, and that she just hadn't noticed until now. However, the word is so peculiar, and she is so acute, that I'm willing to give her more credit than that. It's more than likely just a coincidence, though certainly an amusing one.

But on the off-chance that it's not a coincidence, and for some reason a Radio 1 producer has been trawling through this blog for linguistic phenomena to feature on the breakfast show, here's two more things that are similar to eggcorns but are distinctly different. In fact it was a petty annoyance while writing the original article on eggcorns that I couldn't write about these for fear of going off on too much of a tangent, so thank you Radio 1, for allowing me to write even more about people mishearing things.

A malapropism is the usage of an incorrect word to replace another word that sounds similar. They are often used in works of fiction when a character is attempting but failing to sound more intelligent by using a more expansive vocabulary, which can often be humorous. The term comes from Richard Birnsley Sheridan's 1775 play 'The Rivals' in which a character by the name of Mrs. Malaprop utters many such utterances for comic effect. The character herself is named after the adjective 'malapropos' which means 'inappropriate'. However, the technique pre-dates its name, with even Shakespeare utilising them. This has led to an alternative name for malapropisms as 'Dogberryisms' from Much Ado About Nothing's Constable Dogberry who uses them frequently.

While malapropisms are often used intentionally for laughs in fiction, it's examples from real life that can really make us question the intelligence of trusted figures, while also giving us a hearty chuckle. For example, Tony Abbot claiming that "Nobody [...] is the suppository  of all information."  or Governor of Texas and Presidential Candidate Rick Perry accidentally referring to a church shooting as an 'accident' instead of an 'incident'.

Tony Abbot reminds me a little bit of John Simm as The Master in Doctor Who, though I suppose this image isn't particularly flattering to either of them.

Mondegreens also appear frequently in our language, with many great AskReddit threads thriving on their popularity. A Mondegreen is simply a misheard lyric in a song or phrase in a poem. Real-life examples pop up all the time for me, partly because I am absolutely terrible at hearing song lyrics, but largely because my friend Laith will sing out-loud whatever he believes the lyric to be. While not the most amusing, the example that I am always able to remember is Laith's rendition of Daft Punk's 'Get Lucky' which begins "Like the land of the faeries," rather than "Like the legend of the phoenix".

This is the art of the Magic: the Gathering card 'Bitterblossom' by Rebecca Gua. It's absolutely gorgeous (as Guay's art is wont to be) and I'm delighted that it's tangentially relevant here.

The term itself was coined by American writer Sylvia Wright who claims that as a young girl she had misheard a line in the poem 'The Bonnie Earl o' Moray' as "They hae slain the Earl o' Moray/And Lady Mondegreen." rather than the original "They hae slain the Earl o' Moray/And laid him on the green."

I don't need to list examples of Mondegreens because you'll have come across them plenty of times, and you'll probably even have some of your own. If there's any particularly interesting ones, I'd rather quite like to hear them, and next time you tell someone about how you misheard a lyric in a humorous way, you can educate them about Mondegreens too if you like.

And that concludes what is the shortest article currently posted on this site, though I suppose that is not a particularly difficult feat given the length of the previous two. Even this article will be superseded in brevity in due time, but it's been enjoyable to write about things without spending too long discussing them. Thank you for reading, and I'll be back again SoonTM.

Eggcorns - A Damp Squid (which is technically not an animal) and More!

For all intensive purposes, the world is teaming with egg corns. You know, the little things that grow into trees?

Depending on your familiarity with the nuances of the English language, and indeed the way that your brain processes language, you may or may not have noticed three oddities with the above paragraph. The first is the phrase 'for all intensive purposes' which is a common mishearing of 'for all intents and purposes', the second is the term 'teaming' which is usually seen to be a misspelling of 'teeming'. The final one is the eponymous 'egg corn', a mishearing of 'acorn' which gives its name to the phenomenon that I write about today.
An eggcorn is a misheard word or phrase which makes sense as a replacement for the original phrase. This definition can be a bit confusing, but hopefully with some explanation of one or two eggcorns it should start to make sense.

Firstly, imagine as I explain these eggcorns that you've never seen the original word or phrase written down, and that you've only heard them said aloud - that is after all how many of these phrases come to be.

'Egg corn' is easy enough to understand and serves as the root of all eggcorns, so we'll start there. As The Eggcorn Database author Chris Waigl describes: "an acorn is more or less shaped like an egg; and it is a seed, just like grains of corn. So if you don't know how 'acorn' is spelled, 'egg corn' actually makes sense."

It's also not unheard of for someone to claim that they were curled up in the 'feeble position', while most people would write about the 'fetal position' with reference to the position a fetus assumes inside the womb. It's easy to see how the position could be associated with insecurity and weakness, so the adjective 'feeble' is a sensible replacement to anyone that isn't aware of the term's link with pregnancy. The fact that 'fetal position' is so frequently preceded by the words "curled up in" reinforces this notion of weakness, and helps to further explain why this 'mistake' is so common.

An extremely common eggcorn that I personally see a lot on forums and Reddit in particular is the phrase "chalk it up to" written as either "chock it up to" or "chuck it up to". The original phrase is likely an idiom associated with writing a customer's tab up on a piece of slate in a bar, and essentially means to attribute something (usually some kind of loss or mistake) and connotes a certain level of closure over the matter. Of course, the meaning of the phrase is somewhat convoluted, and that leaves the phrase open to interpretation. "Chucking it up to" could come with the imagery of "chucking" (as in throwing) something away, giving the impression that it's now out of the speaker's thoughts. "Chocking it up to" is a little more confusing, perhaps the most direct meaning that could be formed from this spelling relates to a chock (a small block of wood used to stop wheels from rolling). However, it's probably also related to other phrases that use the word 'chock' like "chock-full" and "chock-a-block". Sometimes the frequency of a word or phrase can convince us that it must be used in places that it probably shouldn't be.

Perhaps a more amusing example of an eggcorn is the replacement of the word 'tongs' with 'thongs' in the phrase "going at it hammer and tongs". The original, meaning to put a lot of effort into something, stems from blacksmithing. However, as the general populace isn't particularly well-acquainted with blacksmithing, it's quite likely that tongs are somewhat of a foreign concept, but 'thongs' are more well-known. This does raise some questions though, are people referring to the pieces of leather that form the lash of a whip? Or are people thinking of a G-string? And is it sexual either way? If so, why is there a hammer involved?

I opened up Photoshop for this, and now my search history is kinda strange. Is this even the weirdest image I've ever Photoshopped?

You can browse through The Eggcorn Database at your own leisure, and I encourage you to do so if such things interest you.

One of the best features of The Eggcorn Database is that it reports when and where eggcorns have appeared, so a few laughs can be had while reading the stories of reputable outlets making minor 'mistakes' such as Sports Illustrated claiming that Wilkinson has been "cutting off his nose despite his face".

I write 'mistakes' in singular inverted commas because while these words or phrases deviate away from the original, and in some cases are not Standard English, there's nothing wrong with them. Eggcorns are fantastic in that they feel so fresh and new, with even the term having only been coined in 2003, and they show us how our language can evolve and change. It would be easy to 'correct' people when they deviate away from the norm and use eggcorns, but this would lead to our language becoming stale, besides the fact that it's needless pedantry.

Eggcorns could also help to change our language for the better. "Butt-naked" is often used in place of "buck-naked" (such as in Shaggy's hit 'It wasn't me') which could be a good thing, even if 'butt' is a little too Americanised for my liking, as the Washington State University's 'Common Errors in English' explains:
"The standard expression is “buck naked,” and the contemporary “butt naked” is an error that will get you laughed at in some circles. However, it might be just as well if the new form were to triumph. Originally a “buck” was a dandy, a pretentious, overdressed show-off of a man. Condescendingly applied in the U.S. to Native Americans and black slaves, it quickly acquired negative connotations. To the historically aware speaker, “buck naked” conjures up stereotypical images of naked “savages” or—worse—slaves laboring naked on plantations."

All credit to Ochre_Jelly for this one. Please don't do a Google image search for either 'butt-naked' or 'buck-naked'. However, if you are of the legal age, there are some interesting differences between the results for the two.

In short, eggcorns are - to me - an amusing part of linguistics that allow us to observe language change in real-time. The internet has no doubt helped to rapidly spread eggcorns around, and makes it much easier to identify and cite them, with one popular technique being to simply Google a suspected eggcorn; the number of search results will provide an estimate of the popularity of the phrase. I hope that this article has been at least a little bit interesting, and that maybe you'll be able to better understand someone when they make a 'mistake' with their words or phrases. 

Auto-antonyms and You: Why Should You Care?

It seems these days that everyone around me has a blog. And I think that's a good thing in all honesty, I like seeing content from my friends. However, I am starting to feel a bit left out, I've blogged before, sure, but never in any sort of consistent way. The biggest issue is that I just don't have very much to say. I don't have any concrete political views like ThatToryBoy and I'm probably too impartial to affiliate myself with the left like LeftWingTendencies. I'm certainly not doing anything as exciting as travelling to South Africa like Izzy.

But something I do like to talk about are words. I'm not sure why, but words are very interesting to me, and so I've decided to revive this otherwise decaying, silly-named, and probably quite ugly blog, with a fascinating editorial on the wonder of auto-antonyms.

You might remember antonyms from primary school, or possibly early secondary school, or maybe any other source because who am I to tell you where you remember something from? If you're not aware of them though, they are words that are the opposite of another word. 'Hot' is the antonym of 'Cold'. 'Ugly' is the antonym of 'Beautiful' and so on. Of course, you might also be aware that the prefix 'auto' refers to the self, making an 'auto-antonym' a word that is the opposite of itself.

I feel like the Yin and Yang are a good metaphor for auto-antonyms. At the very least, it's symbolic in a way that makes me appear more profound, and that's probably a good thing.

While the English language is incredibly contradictory, I find that nothing more encapsulates the sheer breadth and pointlessness of it all than a word which can single-handedly contradict itself. (Of course, other languages have their own auto-antonyms, but my knowledge of those extends only to the wikipedia entries for them, so I'm not going to focus on those.)

'Cleave' is, for whatever reason, always the example that pops into my head first when I'm trying to explain the concept of an auto-antonym, despite being a generally poor example due to being an uncommon word in the first place, coupled with it's secondary definition being used even less frequently. Put simply, 'to cleave' something can mean to cut it in two, which I'm sure most people are aware of, but it can also mean to attach two things together. This makes 'cleave' an auto-antonym, as splitting something into two and combining two things into one are clearly opposites of one another, it's just a shame that the second definition of the word is so often relegated to being used in a literary context, with fanatics cleaving to beliefs, or tongues cleaving to mouths.

'Fast' is likely an easier to understand example, with it being used to either mean 'moving quickly' or, a little less commonly, 'fixed in place' as in "holding fast" (or perhaps, to complicate things further "cleaving fast"). Moving quickly is very clearly contradictory to not moving at all, so what would I mean if I were to say, "Jack was fast against the wind"? It doesn't really matter, because that sentence is completely out of context, and when it comes to auto-antonyms context is key.

The reason that very few people care about, or are even aware of, auto-antonyms is because though they are often words that we use everyday, they very rarely cause us actual issues. When we're talking about the local butcher's we rarely stop to think if what Peter actually meant was that the butcher was using his incredibly sharp knife to attach pieces of the pig back together.

This is a pig in a bucket. Hopefully it makes the article look more interesting by being cute.

However, one word which I must begrudgingly admit is an auto-antonym is 'literally', a word that is the source of constant confusion due to its overuse. The Oxford English Dictionary now lists 'literally' as either meaning 'exactly true' or 'emphasised, but not actually true'. It's almost upsetting to think that when someone uses the word 'literally' to emphasise something, they're technically still using the word correctly, but hey, that's the evolution of language.

To finish, let's go for a word that could actually cause some confusion. 'Inflammable' is a common enough word that is commonly enough believed to mean 'incapable of burning'. This makes perfect sense, 'flammable' refers to something that can be set alight, and the prefix 'in-' tends to denote the opposite of something. However, this meaning is, conventionally, incorrect. The prefix 'in-' here is actually from the word 'inflame', meaning that 'inflammable' actually means 'something that can be inflamed', the exact opposite of what we would think it to mean! As William Strunk and E.B. White note in their 1979 style guide 'The Elements of Style' "some people are thrown off by the in- and think inflammable means "not combustible." For this reason, trucks carrying gasoline or explosives are now marked FLAMMABLE. Unless you are operating such a truck and hence are concerned with the safety of children and illiterates, use inflammable."

Perhaps Strunk and White are too harsh in their assessment of those who are unaware of the 'true' meaning of 'inflammable', but here they've very handily pointed out one reason why you should maybe care about auto-antonyms. Personally, I just like them as an oddity of language, To close this far too long editorial on words that nobody really cares about, here's a list of auto-antonyms for you to think about, or not, I'm not the boss of you.

Dust, Clip, Left, Trim, Pretty, Quite, Seed, Off.

I'd also love to hear from you if you have any more auto-antonyms to add to the list; mine is by no means comprehensive. Thanks for your time if you've read this far, and I'll be back soon to talk about something else, probably something a bit less niche.