what’s the antonym for “dispel” in the “dispel a myth” sense?
the Merriam-Webster options here seem like poor fits. do I misunderstand what “dispel a myth” means? is “assemble a myth” actually its opposite?
I don’t think there’s an acontextual opposed pair that works here – in the context of myths people would tend to say something like “create” or “invent” or even “concoct” or “construct”, but those aren’t generalized antonyms. I feel like “dispel” is a bit too conventionalized to have a clear antonym.
I checked conceptnet to see if it had any insight but it didn’t even recognize that myths could be dispelled. It did however offer the following wisdom:
Dispel is the antonym of spell.
I am pretty sure that in the context of magic, “spell” used to be a verb as well as a noun. To spell was to cast a spell. Additionally, we get spelling in the sense of assembling letters into words.
Therefore, we could define “to spell” as “to create, to craft, to assemble parts int a whole greater than their sum” or, as Webster says above, “assemble, cluster, collect, concentrate, congregate, gather, ingather.”
Interestingly this is a back-formation and doesn’t actually relate to the etymology! Spell comes from a Germanic word indicating talk or speech (same as “spelling”), whereas dispel is from Latin and is actually dis + pel, where the “pel” is the same as in “compel”, “impel”, etc.
But the convention is that we can only dispel abstract or vague things, so it makes sense to be able to dispell a spell, and the “de-spell” reading reinforces that. Nonetheless, we don’t really have a spell/dispel or respel/dispel pairing; it’s not that strong an association. You could promote it as a naturalistic double, but you’d have to convince people to restart using “spell” as a verb in that sense, which is a tall order!
