Answers:
An establishmentarian is someone who favors creating the establishment -- which, in that time, was the state church.
A disestablishmentarian is one who favors removal of the existing establishment.
An antidisestablishmentarian is one who oppses that removal ... but is not necessarily in favor of creating a new state church. This person could favor the existing church, or simply favor the serenity of the status quo, or perhaps just doesn't like the disestablishmentarians because they smoke corn silk in phone booths on Sunday.
The word originated in colleges in the late 50's. it was a description of the Beatniks. They were the anti culture of the day previous to the hippies or flower children of the late 60's.It means they were opposed to authority basically and it was at the time the longest word in the english language. They were non- conformists in other words. but i like that word anyways. it predated supercalifragilisticexpealidoc...
Actually its not contradictory, but I get your point some of the prefixes are diametric opposites...
To Understand further break it down into its constituent parts
Establish being the base word, could be talking about alot of things, but in this case its about churches... which gets us to Establishment again referring to church... well church communities anyhow... disestablishment would mean the breakup of church communities, so an antidisestablishmentarian approach would be one that is against such a thing, which brings us to the full term antidisestablishmentarianism, a movement against the breaking up of church communities... or at least thats how I understood it...
Note: I think the term you were looking for was prefix, anti and dis are both prefixes, just as ment, arian, and ism are suffixes for this word, its what part of the word the the prefix/suffix applies to that is important... not that they're contradictory
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