Word for nonce antonyms formed by reversing idioms

Question

Someone recently used "on-limits" to describe something that was allowed, i.e. not "off-limits." The same person subsequently described unplugging something as "plugging it out," i.e. the opposite of "plugging it in." To be clear, this person is a native English speaker and is engaging in word play.

I found these to be rather charming creations, but are obviously not proper or common usage. I am curious if this sort of thing is a known phenomenon and if there is a word to describe it.

This concept rings similar to a malaphor, i.e. a mixture of two aphorisms ("we'll burn that bridge when we come to it"), and it sort of resembles an unpaired word, wherein the removal of a negative prefix does not result in an antonym (ambiguate is not an antonym of disambiguate).

Would love to hear any thoughts on this.

Answer 1

There is nothing in English that is “not proper”

There can be things that are not common (e.g. obsequious or morrow), inappropriate for the context (e.g. street language in Parliament or vice-versa), or new coinages, but they are perfectly cromulent. It’s perfectly proper for your friend to expand the language with new words. After all:

We are looking at the lost positive

This is a broad church.

A “true” lost positive is a word that once existed in English but has fallen into disuse except in the negative form. So once, with appropriate gorm and feckfullness, it would still not have been evitable that we could eff the ineffable. Because, it’s ineffable, it would need to be effable to be effed, obviously.

There are also words whose definitions have changed; the positive still exists but it doesn’t mean the opposite of the negative anymore. We can appoint someone to high office, but while we can disappoint them, it doesn’t mean we sacked them, but it did once.

Related are those where the words themselves have changed so they no longer form an obvious pair. Like unkempt/combed, or inept/aptitude.

Then, there are the imports; words that have a pair in another language but English only ever imported one of them.

Then again, there are the ones that aren’t really opposites. Disgruntled is not the opposite of the disused word gruntled meaning to complain; here, “dis” is used as an intensifier not a negator - a disgruntled person is someone who complains a lot. But we now have, thanks to P G Wodehouse, the modern form of gruntled meaning to be satisfied. A found positive for a word that was actually a negative.

Which brings us to your friend’s back-creations. These are also lost positives in the sense that they were absent and have now been coined. My favourite is ‘combulated’ as the opposite of the word deliberately made up in the 19th century as a play on both ‘discomfort’ and ‘discompose’ - if you transit through Milwaukee, be sure to stop off in their Recombobulation Area.