this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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I wonder what the word was. On a related note, I often see native English speakers saying "apart" when they mean "a part". Those are not quite opposites, but are pretty different. "Apart" means "separated by a distance" whereas "a part" means "an element of a greater whole".
It's part of the whole "alot", "aswell" "noone" trend where people just remove the space between words. Sometimes this results in a new "word", but occasionally the new "word" already exists and already has its own definition.
The fun part is that the word is an abstract concept inside your head, not in the text. They're removing those spaces from "a lot", "as well", "no one" etc. because they're already functionally words for those speakers.
I like this reply alot.
I think it's the opposite. That for a lot of people, words don't really exist in any other way than as sounds.
That could work too. In both cases you get the word being formed in the spoken language, and then interfering on the spelling only afterwards. The difference is if defining the word syntactically (like I did) or phonologically (like your reasoning leads to).
[Kind of off-topic trivia, but for funzies] I've seen similar phenomena in other languages, like:
Both of our explanations would work fine for those two too, mind you; they both sound like unitary words and behave as such. (e.g. they repel syntactical intrusion).
My guess is the word was biweekly, bimonthly, or biannually. If they agreed to pay bimonthly, there's a big difference between twice a month and once every two months.
Here is a list of auto-antonyms