When I use a word, it
means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.
That’s how Humpty Dumpty from the book Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll decides the meanings of words!
English is a strange language. It first hits you with the catapult of bizarre spellings, then drops you from the highest floor of the eerie building of grammatical rules and finally shoots you with the bullet of peculiar pronunciations!
You can never depend on the sound of a word to deduce its meaning as there are words which mean nothing what they sound like. The meanings of such words seem to have been decided by Humpty Dumpty himself! Such words are informally called as Phantonyms (phantom + antonym).
Here’s a look at 10 phantonyms in English which are sure to trip even seasoned speakers such as President Obama:
1. Inflammable
The opposite of flammable is non-flammable.
2. Disinterested
The opposite of interested is uninterested.
3. Enormity
4. Suffrage
5. Fulsome
6. Vagitus
7. Phosphene
8. Noisome
9. Restive
10. Minimus
