I have a paragraph that uses a paragraph style that makes the entire paragraph italic (among other things). I want the first word to be roman. I would prefer to use a style for this, because the client may change her mind, and it's easier to change the style than it would be to change every occurrence of the style. So I made a character style that sets the font, makes it not bold and not italic. I even cleared direct formatting by selecting the paragraph and pressing CTRL spacebar. But when I apply the character style to the first word, it remains italic.

How do I make a character style that will change italic text to roman?

Figured it out, and it's really bass-ackwards. Italic is a toggle. If you apply an italic character style to italic text, you get roman.