Storms are breaking

[Jonathan Lighter]

I think he goofed, but the real horror is that I hadn't noticed till I read
this twice.

It must be because we think of "clouds" breaking, and storms issue from
clouds (except at the beginning of _The Last Wave_).

But in a sense it's also an auto-antonym, or could be seen that way. The
presence of the word "past" makes it hard to misinterpret, though.

JL

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 3:26 PM, Geoffrey Nathan <geoffnathan at wayne.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Geoffrey Nathan <geoffnathan at WAYNE.EDU>
> Subject:      Storms are breaking
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> CNN is quoting the President this afternoon as saying:
>
> 'We can be confident that the storms of the past two years are beginning to
> break.'
>
> That struck me as odd, since that's not what I think he meant,
> so I looked it up in the Cobuild Dictionary Online, where it says
>
> verb 'If the weather breaks or a storm breaks , it suddenly becomes rainy
> or stormy after a period of sunshine.
> I've been waiting for the weather to break...' V
>
> so, is 'the storm is breaking' one of those auto-antonyms?  Or did Obama's
> speechwriter goof?
>
> Geoff
>
> Geoffrey S. Nathan
> Faculty Liaison, C&IT
> and Associate Professor, Linguistics Program
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