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The concept can be found in the work of the Hellenistic sophist and philosopher Favorinus (c. 110 CE) who observed that faint and half-hearted praise was more harmful than loud and persistent abuse.
The phrase is derived from the French word "air" which meant appearance or look. The phrase has been in use since the 1500s. [4] To "Give Airs" was also referred to as a fake way of acting. [8] "Put on" is in modern emphatic use means: "to assume deceptively or falsely; to feign, affect or pretend." [9]
Other characters also feign for love. [5] Odysseus feigned madness by yoking a horse and an ox to his plow and sowing salt [6] or plowing the beach. Palamedes believed that he was faking and tested it by placing his son, Telemachus right in front of the plow. When Odysseus stopped immediately, his sanity was proven.
A thesaurus (pl.: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar meanings to other words), [1] [2] sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, sometimes simply as lists of synonyms and antonyms.
A contronym is a word with two opposite meanings. For example, the word cleave can mean "to cut apart" or "to bind together". This feature is also called enantiosemy, [1] [2] enantionymy (enantio-means "opposite"), antilogy or autoantonymy. An enantiosemic term is by definition polysemic.
The word poecilonym is a rare synonym of the word synonym. It is not entered in most major dictionaries and is a curiosity or piece of trivia for being an autological word because of its meta quality as a synonym of synonym. Antonyms are words with opposite or nearly opposite meanings. For example: hot ↔ cold, large ↔ small, thick ↔ thin ...
An antonym is one of a pair of words with opposite meanings. Each word in the pair is the antithesis of the other. A word may have more than one antonym. There are three categories of antonyms identified by the nature of the relationship between the opposed meanings.
A feigned retreat is a military tactic, a type of feint, whereby a military force pretends to withdraw or to have been routed, in order to lure an enemy into a position of vulnerability.