With a quarter of a million words or so to play with, it might seem odd that English uses some of them several times over to mean different things. Normally, the context enables you to tell them apart and recognise the difference between, say, a curious man who is inquisitive and a curious man who has two heads, or between a conductor of an orchestra and a conductor on a bus (if such a job still exists). Sometimes it’s harder: does a French teacher teach French, or come from France? A French French teacher, of course, would do both.

Then there are words that sound like opposites, but in fact mean the same (flammable, inflammable; the opposite of both is non-flammable). And there are words misused by some people to mean the opposite of what many of us have long supposed them to mean. Literally.

Conventionally, “sanction” and “sanctions” have been used to mean more or less the opposite of each other. To sanction (verb) something is to approve it. To impose sanctions (noun) is to stop something you disapprove of. So politicians might sanction (permit) the use of sanctions (forbidding) trade with a country they don’t, for the moment, happen to like very much.

OED definitions of the noun “sanction” involve penalties or coercion, typically to enforce a law or treaty. So you find compound phrases such as “sanction-breaker” (quoted from the Guardian in connection with sanctions against Rhodesia in 1968). Rather chillingly, a draft 1993 addition to the OED includes a new definition: “sanction: in military intelligence, the permission to kill a particular individual.”

Definitions of “sanction” as a verb include ratify, confirm, permit, authorise and encourage. So you get expressions such as “sanctioned by common sense” and “sanctioned by usage”.

The OED also gives the definition “to impose sanctions upon (a person), to penalise”. It adds that this is “a use of doubtful acceptability at present”. That, however, was before the Department for Work and Pensions came along.

This year, in a story headlined “More sanctions imposed on jobseekers allowance claimants”, we reported: “The number of sanctions imposed on jobseeker’s allowance claimants rose to 227,629 in the last three months of 2013, an increase of 69,600 on the equivalent quarter in 2012.”

Lest anyone is in any doubt, such sanctions are punitive: these people have had their benefits stopped. Or to put it another way: they have, according to the DWP, been “sanctioned”.

We quoted a man named Neil Couling, the DWP’s work services director, who having claimed that “many benefit recipients welcome the jolt that a sanction can give them”, went on to concede: “Some people no doubt react very badly to being sanctioned [my italics] – we see some very strong reactions.”

To be fair to the DWP – and there’s an expression you don’t hear every day – there is a certain logic to using sanction in the sense of applying sanctions. Language, however, is not logical; if it were, “get on up” would not mean exactly the same as “get on down”.

Geoffrey Howe faced censure from the Daily Mail – our unlikely bedfellows on this one – for his misuse of ‘sanction’. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

This is not the first time it’s been done: in 1978, the Daily Mail reported: “Sir Geoffrey Howe ... referred to Ford’s being ‘sanctioned’ ... Nobody made a protest about this violence being done to the English language (or about normal meanings being stood on their head).” I agree with the Daily Mail. (Another expression I never thought you’d hear me use.)

The problem with using a word to mean its opposite is that it hinders clear communication. I don’t use “literally” to mean figuratively because ultimately both words will lose any meaning. The same can be argued for using “sanction” to mean punish, rather than permit.

There’s another reason to resist the DWP’s “sanctioning” of people. It’s dehumanising, perhaps unsurprisingly in a department that talks about people in terms of “benefit units” and “stock”. If you are taking someone’s benefits away, “sanctioning them” simultaneously makes it clear that the blame lies with the claimant and avoids any unpleasantness about what is really involved – children going hungry, for example.

So has the use of “sanction’ to mean punish been sanctioned by usage? I hope not.