To oppose is to object?

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:40

In public discussions of an issue, there are usually two opposing sides representing opposite points of view on the proposed issue. If one group believes that statement "A" is true, then it means that the group that considers statement "B" to be true will oppose it. As for the concept of "oppose", how often do people think about its correct meaning? And is it the right way to use it?

The lexical meaning of the word "oppose"

This fairly common word has two main meanings recorded in dictionaries. Let's open, for example, the corresponding article in the Big Explanatory Dictionary of the Modern Russian Language. Unlike most polysemantic words, the word "oppose" is one of those whose lexical meanings almost do not differ from each other, only have their own small details.

The first lexical meaning is "to make objections to someone in a dispute or in a public conversation." It is narrower, but it is the main one because it arose precisely for such cases. There is a second, similar meaning of the word "oppose". This is "to object to someone, to challenge someone's opinion." This meaning is broader, but it departs from its original scope.

Examples of use in a sentence

Better to master the use of a word helps to build sentences with it. Below are some examples of sentences with the right word:

• opposing him is not an easy task;
• relativists, opposing this point of view, argued that when light was scattered, it should have deviated, but this is not observed;
• therefore, opposing the common excuses of the established order in our time with references to Russian political culture, I specifically turned to the Russian tradition.

As you can see from the above examples, all meanings of the word "oppose" are close to each other.