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"tiger" in Swedish means both tiger and "being quiet".

• mmhsieh 7y ago
  thanks all for the clarifications. the only point i was making was that for some, the brain can be confused by seemingly contradictory imagery when the goal was to convey some wordplay. this might be lost on me because no such wordplay exists in any language i am familiar with.
  • phamilton 7y ago
    Contranyms (homophones with opposite meanings) exist in English. A potential (contrived) example in English would be to use the notion of a strike in baseball as a covert communication for a worker strike. I could imagine signs and stickers made with an umpire making the strike hand gesture. That's not completely contradictory, but maybe a self defense guide might use that imagery for instructing someone to strike an assailant. And there, a strike in baseball is literally missing the ball, or failing to strike the ball. So very opposite.
    • mmhsieh 7y ago
      i was not aware of such a concept; it is interesting. i was thinking back in wwii, if they had a "hush puppies" campaign in lieu of loose lips etc. - it probably would have been mis-processed in my mind as well. puppies = yapping. any other message would be swamped by the puppy noise. my mind goes to the tangible, physical and spatial first, and the abstract/symbolic second.