When I was a kid I had a book of word puzzles (well, I had a bunch, but this one in particular stands out to me), and one of the puzzles was exactly the above - it just gave a bunch of words and asked for opposites of specific lengths, like "Opposite of fast (3 letters)".
And I was absolutely stumped. The puzzle text assured the reader that they were all common words - no archaic lost words or anything like that - and I spent FOREVER trying to figure out a three-letter word for "slow". The book had Will Shortz's name on it, so there was no way they'd accept something as sloppy as "slo", and obviously the opposite of "fast" had to be something that meant "slow" so... what could it possibly be?
Eventually I gave up and looked at the answer in the back the book, and saw "eat", and I was like
Like my third eye just blew the fuck open and I could suddenly see that language is sounds and symbols and they have no meaning except that which we assign and agree to, and a word without a context is just a noise I make with my face, and the opposite of "fast" is a reflection of it across an axis, and it's is "slow" when you talk to a driver and "eat" when you talk to a dietician and "loose" when you're holding a screwdriver and "unfaithful" when you're telling your new best friend about your former best friend and "impermanent" when your laundry is now pink and "sedate" when you're talking about how people live and "lightly" when you're talking sleep and "feast" when you're celebrating Ramadan and all of these are just thoughts that people before us wanted to share and so they gave sounds and letters to them and "fast" could be a kind of refrigerator or the feeling of pain in your gallbladder or a dance with a carp if people wanted it because words aren't things, there's no platonic ideal of "fast" there's just my "fast" and your "fast" and his "fast" and their "fast" and a million million other "fast"s and we even each have many "fast"s ourselves and a lot of the time they mostly align but nothing is ever perfect and "a language" isn't a thing it's just a map we each made up on our own to try to understand the territory and we made up the territory too.
2087
gummygunk
stormborns
snowghoul
blakekathryn
germansingergirl
