Saturday 16 July 2011

Ying and Yang

I had a thought yesterday.


According to Newton every action has an equal and opposite reaction. I wonder if this applies to more than physics. What I'm getting at is the idea of perfect opposites.




Yes is the perfect opposite of No.


Day is the perfect opposite of Night.




You get the idea. However when we come to more complex objects and ideas things get...well complicated. What's the perfect opposite of a hammer? The easy answer would be a nail, but it's not that easy. Both hammers and nails are used to make things, and so cannot be perfect opposites.




Then I thought about words. Words are simple.


Yes/No


Right/Wrong


But what about a whole sentence, or an Idiom?




One immediately jumped into my mind.


The glass is half full/The glass is half empty




Simply by changing one word you get a change from optimist to pessimist. A perfect opposite. It didn't feel right though. Only one word was changed, and changed into it's own perfect opposite. It seemed like cheating.




OK so next step is to take a saying, make it's exact opposite and use a whole bunch of different words. To answer the unspoken question some of you may have swishing around in your head, yes I was bored.....very bored. Surprisingly though it was mildly entertaining and produced a few giggles.




If you have nothing better to do, I highly recommend doing some yourself. Below are a few I came up with, just to give you an idea of how it works. Once you've got the hang of it, challenge a friend and see who comes up with the best one (bonus points for doing actions and making said friend snort while laughing)




"Look before you leap."


has the perfect opposite of


"Fuck it! Weeeeeeeeeeee!"




"The grass is always greener on the other side."


is the exact opposite of


"The secret to a nice garden is to paint your lawn twice a week."




"Aim for the moon, and even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."


is the flip side of


"Aim for the balls, you'll get whatever you want then."




OK so that last one was stretching it a bit, but fuck it. My game my rules.






No comments: