{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "what's the antonym for \"dispel\" in the \"dispel a myth\" sense? \nthe Merriam-Webster options here seem like poor fits. do I...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/674675898053804032/", "html": "
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 \u201cconcoct\u201d or \u201cconstruct\u201d, but those aren\u2019t generalized antonyms. I feel like \u201cdispel\u201d is a bit too conventionalized to have a clear antonym.
I checked conceptnet to see if it had any insight but it didn\u2019t 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, \u201cspell\u201d 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 \u201cto spell\u201d as \u201cto create, to craft, to assemble parts int a whole greater than their sum\u201d or, as Webster says above, \u201cassemble, cluster, collect, concentrate, congregate, gather, ingather.\u201d
Interestingly this is a back-formation and doesn\u2019t actually relate to the etymology! Spell comes from a Germanic word indicating talk or speech (same as \u201cspelling\u201d), whereas dispel is from Latin and is actually dis + pel, where the \u201cpel\u201d is the same as in \u201ccompel\u201d, \u201cimpel\u201d, 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 \u201cde-spell\u201d reading reinforces that. Nonetheless, we don\u2019t really have a spell/dispel or respel/dispel pairing; it\u2019s not that strong an association. You could promote it as a naturalistic double, but you\u2019d have to convince people to restart using \u201cspell\u201d as a verb in that sense, which is a tall order!
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