Phantonyms - now you know...

I'm guilty of one of these...

NYT
By JACK ROSENTHAL
Published: September 25, 2009
For the prospective college class of 2015, the next three weeks loom large. High-school juniors across the country, facing their first Preliminary SAT exams, are engrossed in improving their vocabulary. Here¹s a thought that might help: A word that means the opposite of another is an antonym; a word that looks as if it means one thing but means quite another could be called a phantonym, and warrants wariness.

Phantonyms pop up in the usage of even so careful a speaker as President Obama. As William Safire noted in March, when the president said that he wanted the American people to have ³a fulsome accounting² for his stimulus program, he meant full, whereas to punctilious authorities the word means disgusting, excessive, insincere.
Likewise, noisome does not mean noisy but smelly, unhealthful. In a Times book review two years ago, Jack Shafer tartly described a Washington columnist¹s ³noisome journalistic methods.² Enormity does not mean enormous but great wickedness, a monstrous act. That¹s just how Craig Whitney, who will retire this week as The Times¹s standards editor, used the term in reviewing a World War II book in May 2008: ³The author . . . misses the enormity of what the postwar terrorists did.²

When such terms are misused frequently, some authorities have come to tolerate them as ³loose usage.² You need not be a hypercorrective schoolmarm to lament such tolerance. A simple concern for clarity should lead students of all ages to recognize and avoid phantonyms, lest they look unlettered ? and lose SAT points. Here are other ghostly misuses that cloud clear language.
Disinterested is occasionally used as if it means uninterested ? indifferent or bored. For example, a Times article in February 2008 described Senator Joseph Lieberman as ³so disinterested in the Democratic presidential candidates² that he didn¹t vote in the primary. Nine out of 10 American Heritage Dictionary authorities would reject that usage. The favored definition is unbiased or impartial, as in Adam Liptak¹s article in The Times in March 2008 about foreign judges: ³Punishments, they say, should be meted out only by the criminal justice system . . . and disinterested prosecutors.²
Enervated. Appearances can be deceiving, as when an NPR commentator described the men fighting a fire in Nevada as tired but enervated by their progress. The word, a phantonym of energized, in fact means weakened.
Fortuitous looks like lucky, as it did to an official at N.Y.U. when Philippe de Montebello, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, accepted an appointment as a professor: ³It was so fortuitous,² she said. But the word means ³happening by chance,² says The Times¹s Manual of Style and Usage. ³It does not mean fortunate.²
Penultimate, some writers are surprised to learn, does not mean ultraultimate. It derives from the Latin word for almost and means next to last. That was tragically demonstrated in a Times account of a killer wave in Maine last month: ³The penultimate wave in the fatal series landed at the ankles of observers on the rocks. The one after that was unlike all the rest.²
Presently does not mean now but in a little while. Currently conveys the intended meaning clearly. Newscasters, meanwhile, seem to have abandoned now and strain for dramatic immediacy by turning as we speak into a cliché.
Restive is a doubly dicey term. It does not mean restful; nor does it mean restless, sometimes used to contrast with restful. Dictionaries define it as stubborn, balky.
Word mavens like Patricia O¹Conner, author of the book ³Woe Is I,² have prosecuted these and other such terms. You could argue that arguably also belongs on the list, because it seems increasingly to imply approval rather than neutrality. What¹s unarguable is that when careful writers, and wise test takers, confront a shadowy phantonym, they¹ll resist.

The one im guilty of is "fortuitous"

"If you can, tell me something happy."
- Marybones