changing antonyms

[Benjamin Barrett]

I don't know if this will help or not, but "a bomb" is something that went
badly and "the bomb" is something that's hella good.

Benjamin Barrett
gogaku at ix.netcom.com

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On Behalf Of
Lynne Murphy

I'm looking for examples of semantic change in which (at least) one
member of an antonym pair changed meaning, such that at least one of the
original pair ended up with a different antonym than it had before.
Another good type of example would be one in which semantic change
happened in one dialect but not another, so that a single word has
different antonyms in two dialects.  I don't know if such things exist.


What I am _not_ looking for is cases in which a word has several
possible antonyms depending on the jargon/register/other sense in use.
I'm looking for cases in which two words were antonyms, but they're not
anymore.

By 'antonym' here, I mean a kind of 'canonical' opposite.  E.g., 'hot'
and 'cool' are opposed in meaning, but the canonical opposition is
'hot'/'cold'.

I'd be happy to hear of examples in any language--and in fact, lexical
borrowing might provide some interesting examples.