![]() ![]() You are using a different word when you say “cleave” to mean “split” than when you use it to mean “fuse.” Janusness is slippery this way. “Thou didst cleave the earth with rivers,” the King James has it, but then, in another place, “the clods cleave fast together.” Beware, though: The two meanings descend from separate Old English verbs, clíofan and clífan. Probably the most famous Janus word is “cleave,” which means both to chop in two and to bind. “Fast” is a convenient example: People run fast, but they can also stand fast, i.e., stay in place. Cheyne gave it the name of the two-faced Roman god who looks forward and back at the same time. The term “Janus word” was coined in the 1880s by the English theologian Thomas Kelly Cheyne to describe a word that can express two, more or less opposite meanings. ![]()
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