But then I hesitated. Maybe Id been too hasty, nabbing the obvious suspect without interviewing Miss Scarlett and Professor Plum. Perhaps there was an antonym within psychology literature or the Babel of options beyond my own glossary. Time to consult the crowd. Wisdom, said Socrates, is knowing you know nothing and the Greek strikes me as an intelligent bloke.

Albert Einstein, another bright spark, defined coincidence as Gods way of remaining anonymous. Cool then, if we could divine how God declares Their name in a singular event, then Bob was our uncle. I tweeted the question just as cops beseech the public, and waited for words of interest to arrive.

A trickle turned to gush as suggestions filled the screen, from singularity to disparity, from choreography to planning. Certainty and consequence came next, followed by fate and synchronicity, but none seemed a snug fit. Neologisms lobbed, ranging from nonincidence to cooutcidence. Not for the first time, my word quest had entered a mirror maze.

Not every rough has a smooth, yet English is home to a horde of esoteric antonyms.

Thats when the philosophers joined the debate. Azed a crossword syndicate in Britain tackled the matter in earnest: What we usually mean by coincidence is the absence of a causal explanation for two or more events occurring close together, i.e. it can only be explained by coincidence. Therefore, they concluded, the antonym must be causality, being the alternative explanation.

Compare that argument to Auric Goldfingers aphorism, the Latvian super-villain who tormented James Bond at Fort Knox, back in 1964. His take was simple: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time, its enemy action. Meaning the flipside of coincidence must be happenstance. Or enemy action. I cant tell.

Soon I came to see the sense of another Twitter respondent: Your questions like asking after the opposite of humans or television. Just because theres X doesnt mean theres unX, so to speak. Not every rough has a smooth, yet English is home to a horde of esoteric antonyms.

Moontan, say, applies to pallid skin, just as aestivate counterweighs hibernate. Overdog translates as favourite, while kempt was revived as a wry joke, only to return to the dictionary as the equivalent of tidy, just as underwhelmed has overwhelmed popular speech lately.

Leaving me with the likelihood of incidence, my initial suspect if I recall. It also leaves me the chance to say happy holidays, as a stand-alone utterance, unless you happen to reciprocate the wish, which would then verge on coincidental. Possibly.

davidastle.com

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Wordplay: That's what I wasn't going to say - Sydney Morning Herald