The Sweet Dropper

One of our favorite hymns begins, How sweet and awful is the place with Christ within the doors. Well, John Newton wrote it that way. The editors of the 1990 Trinity Hymnal “updated” it so that now we sing How sweet and awesome is the place…The substitution of awesome for awful (as in, “full of awe”) works. The meaning is nearly identical. But as a lover of words and sometimes reverse-chronological snob, I will often still sing awful in place of awesome anyway. I do the same thing with the last line of last verse of Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, singing the original

Let the amen sound from his people again gladly for aye (with long a) we adore him.

instead of the revised,

Let the amen sound from his people again loudly fore’er we adore him.

But I digress. Awful is one of the English words that is an auto-antonym (AKA antagonym, contranym, Janus word, enantiodrome, self-antonym, oxymoronym). Gene Edward Veith recently posted a partial list of English words with two contradictory meanings:

apology
(1) an admission of error accompanied by a plea for forgiveness (2) a formal defense or justification (as in Plato’s Apology), also referred to as an apologia
before
(1) in advance of (“the future is before us”) (2) at an earlier time, previously (“our forefathers came before us”)
cleave
This is a homophone, where two words, spelled and pronounced alike, have different origins. (1) “To adhere firmly”, from Old English clifian. (2) to split (as with a cleaver), from Old English cleofan
critical
Can mean “vital to success” (a critical component), or “disparaging” (a critical comment).
custom
As a noun, this means “conventional behavior”; but as an adjective, it means “specially designed”.
sanction
“To permit” or “to restrict” (as in “economic sanctions.”)
seed
To add seeds, is in seeding a field, or to remove seeds, as in seeding a fruit.
strike
Normally meaning “to hit”, in baseball it means “to miss”, and an extension of this usage has led to the meaning “to make a mistake”. Further adding to the contradiction, in bowling it refers to the best possible play. Another contradiction results with the phrase strike out: the baseball lineage leads to the meaning “to run out of hope”; but the original lineage also leads to the meaning “to start pursuing a desire”
suspicious
Can mean that a person is acting in a way that suggests wrong-doing, i.e. “He seems very suspicious.” or can mean that the person in question suspects wrong doing in others, i.e. “He was suspicious of her motives.”