How Did I Not Know This?
July 17, 2025
For two of my three years in junior high school, my English teacher was the late Peggy Riley Hughes, a woman best described as a martinet. To say she didn’t suffer fools lightly would be an understatement. The woman taught grammar and sentence structure with a yardstick in hand and would smack the blackboard with it to make a point or scold a student for a wrong answer, both of which happened repeatedly throughout the class hour. The two blackboards that filled the front and one side of the room were completely pockmarked. Rumor had it that before my time in her classroom, the repeated assault caused the slate of one blackboard to break into pieces and fall to the floor.
Mrs. Hughes bullied us into learning. These days, her teaching tactics would get her fired. But we learned. I may no longer remember how to diagram a sentence, but those grammar rules she hammered into us have stayed with me. I suppose that’s why I wince over split infinitives and dangling participles. I especially find the misuse of the nominative and subjective cases as irritating as fingernails on a blackboard.
We also learned about synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms. What I had never heard of until recently (shoutout to Juanita Violini who posted the chart on the Sisters in Crime loop) were contronyms. These are words that have two opposite meanings. Contronyms are also called Janus words, after the Roman god with two faces who looked in opposite directions, or auto-antonym, words meaning the opposite of themselves.
One common contronym is “left.” It means both “to leave” and “to remain” as in: After I left the scene, three actors were left on the stage. There are many other contronyms, more than I realized until I came across the attached chart a fellow writer posted on one of my mystery groups. I found it fascinating to read through the list of contronym words.
Several times, while doing research for one of my Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries, I’ve come across obscure and obsolete laws still on the books in New Jersey. For instance, there is still a law that makes it illegal to frown at a police officer. (However, it’s perfectly legal to flip an officer the bird because that falls under the First Amendment.) This law made its way into SORRY, NOT SORRY the thirteenth book in the series, when my sleuth’s communist mother-in-law mounts a “Stand Up for Your Right to Frown” campaign.
Being both a mystery author and a Word Nerd, I’m now thinking about the possibility of employing contronyms as misdirected clues in the book I’m currently writing.
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Posted in Let's Talk, with Lois Winston • Tags: Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries, Contronym, How Did I Not Know This, Lois Winston | 21 Comments
When I was in high school my English teacher, Ms. Altschul, had a favorite sentence. It was “Dead birds don’t eat cookies.” I don’t remember what she was trying to teach us about grammar with that sentence, but I never forgot it.
LOL, Anita! I’m probably going to mull over that sentence all day to try to figure out why she used it. Thanks for stopping by and commenting.
Hi Lois, I also had a fierce English teacher in the sixth grade who would slap her hand on the desk when one of us missed a question. We had to come up to the blackboards which surrounded the classroom, and diagram sentences in front of the whole class. It was harsh, but I too love the result.
Cheryl, I wonder if sentence diagraming is even still taught in schools these days. I don’t remember my sons having to diagram sentences for homework.
I’m such a nerd that I loved diagramming (still do). Like you, though, I had never heard the word contronym – although we all use them all the time.
I always found diagramming sentences fun, Debra, but I’d be hard pressed to remember how to do it all these decades later.
I found this fascinating! I got an A in English in high school and don’t remember ever learning what a contronym was. Of course that was 50 years ago and I may not remember everything I learned!
LOL, Helen! If only we could remember everything we ever learned!
Lois, I have to give my one and only writing teacher, Shirley Wiley, a shout out here. Like your experience, I had Mrs. Wiley for two out of the three years in high school. she was a fierce defender of everything creative, and eschewed the basic required curriculum, assuming we wouldn’t be in her class if we didn’t already know grammar and spelling. Her spirit still sits on my shoulder while I write.
Gay, those two years in Mrs. Hughes’ classroom gave me a fabulous foundation. I’ll always be grateful to her, even if she did sometimes scare the caca out of me! 😉
I didn’t get the intense teaching on split infinitives and verb tenses (learned most of that later in Spanish class). But diagramming sentences was my jam. I am a visual learner, so seeing all the sentence in a drawing made perfect sense to me. That teacher was one of two that had been teaching in our system forever and a day. I had the other “expert” in elementary school and that’s how I learned my times tables… Second teacher would’ve been fired in today’s world for her tactics of slamming a belt buckle into the bottom metal back of your all-in-one-desk. The kid behind me always feel asleep, so she could come up behind him and whip that belt buckle into his desk to wake him up. I jumped a mile high. Still get panicky when I have to think about multiplication.
ps i loved the list of the opposite meanings of some words. Those have always puzzled me.
Maggie, it wasn’t until I had learned that Mrs. Hughes had died that I realized how young she was when I had her, only her mid 20s. She was tall and blonde with an hourglass figure but totally ferocious!
Love diagramming, and I am fascinated to learn about Contronyms. Which spell check is having a field day with. Can’t wait to see how you pull this off in your latest novel!
Donnell, I came across several different spellings for contronyms when I was researching. Don’t hold your breath about a contronym clue, though. I’m not going to force it, but if it happens to work, I just might slip one in.
Well, durn, I never heard of one of those creatures neither. Goes to show you. Thanks for learnin’ us! 🙂
That’s some might purty wording y’got there, TK. ;-D
Ha! Ya’ll are just too funny!!!
My high school English teacher was awesome. She really knew how to instill a love for the English language and for literature. I remember my time with her fondly.
Having a good teacher makes all the difference, doesn’t it, Cherie?
Actually it was my HS Latin teacher who made me into a Grammar Goddess. If you can make it through all the Cases in Latin, you can understand the grammar of any language. I can still diagram a sentence at the drop of a hat.
Sharon Modrick
I’ve heard that about Latin, Sharon. I never had the opportunity to take it. We had our choice of French, Spanish, or German. I opted for French.