I seem to remember a youtube video from years ago explaining how things can be opposites in different ways, like glue is the opposite of scissors because of the use, red is the opposite of blue because of what they represent, etc.
The wiki article lists a few categories like gradable words that exist on a spectrum (hot/cold), complementary or binary pairs with no spectrum (entrance/exit, moral/immoral), and relational types that only make sense in a certain context (teacher/student).
I’ve never thought this hard about this before and I’m finding myself suddenly glad that other people have. This is really neat.
Yeah, like think about opposite words that immediately come to mind for certain categories. If you think of the opposite of sweet, do you think sour, or maybe bitter? But in another context, the opposite of any taste is bland/tasteless. Same with emotions, where the opposite of love is commonly thought of as hate, but you could also say that any feeling has its opposite in indifference. Something can be sweet and sour, or you can have love and hate together, but you can’t have a sweet bland thing, or a loving indifferent emotion.
Stuff like this interests me because it strikes at the heart of what we all take for granted in day to day thinking, but if you just slightly alter the lens you have something completely different and new.