Most Nouns Do Not Have Antonyms

But that doesn’t seem to stop some elementary school teachers from insisting that their students come up with these nonexistent opposites anyway. Here is a letter[hmm, the link seems to be dead now] that one exasperated parent has drafted to her daughter’s English teacher after the latter assigned homework that requested the student to come up with antonyms for such words as “matter” and “utensil.”

This struck a chord, because I recently had to reassure my daughter, who was quite upset, that it would (or should) be acceptable to note that “no antonym exists” in the answer space next to certain nouns in a list of words for which she was required to supply the opposite terms. I told her to let me know if the teacher had a problem with this, but so far it hasn’t seemed to have generated a crisis.