994: disgust Aug 29, 2017

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As discussed yesterday, and as any native English speaker would know, there is no positive form of 'disgust', which would resemble something like 'gust'. Unlike other words like 'disk' or 'distich' for which the 'dis-' is simply coincidental, etymologically 'disgust' contains 'dis-' which indicates reversal, but in English there is nothing being obviously reversed. This is by no means the only words where this occurs—it happens fairly frequently with other words including 'distort', 'disguise', and 'dismiss'—especially as English has so many words adopted from other languages completely, or sometimes only as parts of a whole word. In the case of 'disgust', it comes from the Latin word 'gustus' meaning 'taste', and while there is no 'gust' or even 'gustus' in English, the word 'gusto' comes from the same root. Nevertheless, even when a word does start with the historical prefix 'dis-', it does not mean that there should, or even could be a positive form, as with 'discuss' in which the 'dis-' does not negate the root-word, but simply means 'apart'.

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