Doing a 180 on the Linguistic Highway

Rob Kyff
Wed, 21 Jan 2026 12:46:20 -0800
Lifestyle

If you're a rate adjuster at my auto insurance company, please skip the following paragraph.

One winter night when I was 22 years old, I was driving on an icy Massachusetts road when my car spun around 180 degrees. This came as a surprise to me, not to mention the drivers behind me who were now trying to avoid a head-on collision with a car they had been following. Fortunately, none of them collided with me.

Words sometimes perform 180s too — completely reversing their meanings. And when we encounter such verbal turnabouts, we're as shocked and confused as those drivers were.
Updated: Wed Jan 21, 2026

If you're a rate adjuster at my auto insurance company, please skip the following paragraph.

One winter night when I was 22 years old, I was driving on an icy Massachusetts road when my car spun around 180 degrees. This came as a surprise to me, not to mention the drivers behind me who were now trying to avoid a head-on collision with a car they had been following. Fortunately, none of them collided with me.

Words sometimes perform 180s too — completely reversing their meanings. And when we encounter such verbal turnabouts, we're as shocked and confused as those drivers were.

The verb "sanction," for instance, boasts two contradictory meanings: "to approve" or "to penalize." For example, the A.A.U. sanctions (endorses) a track meet, but the U.S. sanctions (penalizes) Iran.

Likewise, "to dust" can mean either "to remove dust," as in "dusting a table," or "to place dust on," as in "dusting crops."

As Adrian Room points out in his book "Dunces, Gourmands and Petticoats — 1,300 Words Whose Meanings Have Changed Through the Ages," such switchery shouldn't make us "upset," which, come to think of it, is a word that performed an about-face a few centuries back.

Until the 1600s, "upset" meant "to set up," that is, "to raise or build something." So when a new apple cart was upset, that was a good thing. But by the 1800s, that meaning had been, well, overturned.

Likewise, you'll be floored to know that "deck" once meant "a roof or ceiling," "obnoxious" meant "exposed to harm," not "offensive or causing harm," and "minister" once meant "a servant."

Manufacture" originally meant to make by hand, yet today we almost always use it in reference to products produced by machine. A couple of centuries ago, "elegant" denoted "an unrefined or tasteless choice of style or fashion"; "reprieve" meant "to take BACK to prison"; a "wan" complexion was a dark and dusky one; and "chuckle" meant "to laugh loudly."

Similarly, "mere," which now means "nothing more than" ("a mere child"), once meant "nothing less than, absolutely." So when Daniel Defoe's character Robinson Crusoe says he became "a mere pastry-cook into the bargain," he means that he became a complete pastry chef — a darn good one.

And if you think there's any glimmer of logic to these inversions, consider "glimmer," which now means "to shine faintly or unsteadily," but originally meant — you guessed it — "to shine brightly" — think high beams, which, come to think of it, I had on when I took my 180-degree spin.