A slight digression to the oxymora thread to ravel it into Janus words [1], but this news item involves mainframe software, so I hope it's not totally OT or OTW [2]. This was forwarded to me as a news headline hot off the press: "Starting today, you will see a bold new marketing campaign that describes how CA technology delivers against customer needs." I can't find this quote on the net, but I did find several similar boasts from companies other than CA. The problem here is that the word "against" means both "in conformity with" and "in opposition to", thus making it eligible for the rare linguistic category known as Janus words, which are individual words that can mean either X or the opposite of X, depending on context and intent. Cleave and oversight are other examples. Bill Fairchild [1] which is what Marilyn Vos Savant calls them, although I think Janus-faced is more correct. [2] Off The Wall
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