Wednesday 18 March 2015

open ended - Shortest sentence with two auto-antonyms


You have to use two words that are each their own opposite (auto-antonyms, contronyms, contranyms or whatever you want to call it) in the same sentence. This means that each of the two words in used twice, and for each word, the two occurrences have meanings that are opposite (contradictory) (**or extremely different ** meaning they are so different one could argue they're opposites.) to each other. This sentence must be a grammatically correct English sentence.


It's ok to use minor variations on words such as plurals or conjugated verb forms.


The goal is to make it short (in terms of characters). The accepted answer will always be the shortest. To save me trouble, it'd be nice for you to post the number of characters in your sentence. Spaces and punctuation count; you can use this site to check.


Anti-loophole: the words you choose must each be used twice, once as one meaning and again as another.



Answer



17 Characters


Using an archaic form of 'let', this ties with the currently first place answer:




Let be or be let.




  • Let: To allow OR to hinder (archaic).

  • Be: The way something already is OR to become different.


Translation: Allow things to stay as they are, or you will become hindered.


Arguably, we can shorten this by removing the 'or' (which flips the meaning of the sentence) and using an implied conditional:


15 Characters




Let be; be let.



Translation: If you allow things to stay as they are, then you will become hindered.


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