993: Indifferent and Different Aug 28, 2017

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English has a few words like 'butle' which come from back-formation—the process of making words by removing what are affixes in other words— but a fairly large group of words like 'gust' from 'disgust', or 'evitable' (or 'evit, for that matter) from 'inevitable' simply don't exist in any vernacular. Unlike 'inevitable' though, which does not have a positive form as its negating prefixes indicates, the word 'different' does exist, but not as an antonym of 'indifferent'. This is because the word comes from 'differ' in the sense that something is changing or, in other words, becoming different. In Middle English, 'different' could also mean, in a general way, 'partial', so 'indifferent' came to mean 'unchanged' or 'impartial'.

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