What is the meaning of "two-sidedness"? I'd like a direct or indirect definition.
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Two-sided as defined in Random House Dictionary:
This is a more direct, literal definition, where the sense of the word applies to concrete things: two-sided coins and two-sided paper.
This is the more indirect, figurative definition, where the sense of the word applies to characteristics of a person, markets, or problems. The implication is that those things with two-sidedness have a more complex nature than what is presented on the outside. Adding '-ness' creates the noun form. |
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Something that has two sides can be called two-sided. The English suffix -ness is used to turn an adjective (or participle) into a noun that refers to the associated quality. For instance, darkness is the quality which dark describes. Thus, two-sidedness is the quality of having two sides. Although this is not a common word, it is a reasonable one. One could say, for instance, that a sheet of paper shows two-sidedness. (It is more likely that two-sidedness would be used in a metaphorical sense rather than a literal sense of that example.) |
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The only occurrence of two-sidedness in the Corpus of Contemporary American English is in an academic paper dated 1990: [he] erred in his prediction that Britain would be one of the superpowers, but he correctly anticipated the “two-sidedness” of world politics after 1945 (note the quotation marks, which appear in the original, marking that the author knows the word is not standardly used). @mgkrebbs gave a good description of using the -ness suffix to form nouns. Two-sided means having two sides, or two aspects. The first meaning is exemplified in a sentence like:
The second can be seen in:
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