The paradox can be eliminated, without changing the meaning of “heterological” where it was previously well-defined, by modifying the definition of “heterological” slightly to hold all nonautological words except “heterological”. But “nonautological” is subject to the same paradox, for which this evasion is not applicable because the rules of English uniquely determine its meaning from that of “autological”. A similar slight modification to the definition of “autological” (such as declaring it false of “nonautological” and its synonyms) might seem to correct that, but the paradox still remains for synonyms of “autological” and “heterological” such as “self-descriptive” and “non–self-descriptive”, whose meanings also would need adjusting, and the consequences of those adjustments would then need to be pursued, and so on. Freeing English of the Grelling–Nelson paradox entails considerably more modification to the language than mere refinements of the definitions of “autological” and “heterological”, which need not even be in the language for the paradox to arise. The scope of these obstacles for English is comparable to that of Russell’s paradox for mathematics founded on sets.
My favorite is ‘Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia’, which is the word for the condition of being phobic of long words. Feels like the doctor who named that one was a bit of a dick XD
The word ‘monosyllabic’ isn’t monosyllabic.
The word ‘alphabetic’ isn’t alphabetic.
The word ‘palindrome’ isn’t a palindrome.
Those are all heterological words, just like “phonetic”.
Autological (or homological) would be words like “pentasyllabic”, “unhyphenated” and “writable.”.
Does the word heterological describe itself?
Uffff, right in my autism.
Luckily the internet helps with that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grelling–Nelson_paradox
Tldr “does the set of all sets contain itself?”
Haha, I’m sorry. It was definitely a set-up.
This just makes me mad lol
deleted by creator
That was the answer to the question.
God deleted it.
My favorite is ‘Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia’, which is the word for the condition of being phobic of long words. Feels like the doctor who named that one was a bit of a dick XD
Same, always fascinated me when I first learnt it
The fear of long words is Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.