![]() ![]() “Portentous,” according to Webster’s, can mean foreboding, “eliciting amazement” and “being a grave or serious matter.” But it can also mean “self-consciously solemn” and “ponderously excessive.” It contains its own yin-yang of success and failure. The experience of reading Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, “The Passenger” - alongside its twisted sister, “Stella Maris,” which comes out later this year - kept making me think about the word “portentous.” Not finding this word identified as a Janus anywhere, I hereby nominate it for candidacy. You are using a different word when you say “cleave” to mean “split” than when you use it to mean “fuse.” Janusness is slippery this way. “Thou didst cleave the earth with rivers,” the King James has it, but then, in another place, “the clods cleave fast together.” Beware, though: The two meanings descend from separate Old English verbs, clíofan and clífan. Probably the most famous Janus word is “cleave,” which means both to chop in two and to bind. ![]() “Fast” is a convenient example: People run fast, but they can also stand fast, i.e., stay in place. Cheyne gave it the name of the two-faced Roman god who looks forward and back at the same time. ![]() The term “Janus word” was coined in the 1880s by the English theologian Thomas Kelly Cheyne to describe a word that can express two, more or less opposite meanings. ![]()
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