Word Facts

It is thought that humans store, not all individual words, but the parts of the words called morphemes separately in the mind. All affixes therefore are added on with their own meanings applied as the word is constructed. The order of the construction can lead to some confusion. The word 'unlockable' has two meanings therefore depending upon whether 'unlock' or 'lockable' came first. With the first, it means that it is able to be unlocked from its currently locked state. The second means that it is not able to be locked, such as something that is closed not with a lock but with a buckle or button; a shirt is unlockable. For more on this topic, click here for yesterday's.

There is a great deal of possible ambiguity in English as to the intended meaning of a sentence, especially without other context. An example of this is the sentence, "she paid the man with gold". Although there may be one meaning that you, individually, interpreted first, there are two ways that this could be understood. One way is that 'gold' is the currency with which the man was paid. The other is that the man already had gold when he was paid by the woman; she could have paid him in silver or dollar bills while the gold was just to further describe the man. Because prepositional phrases can be part of a verbal phrase, or also can be separate and modify a noun phrase, there is no way of knowing for sure.

As was discussed Marche 14, 2016, 'cob' in 'cobweb' means spider. The other sense of 'cob' as in 'corn on the cob' relates to roasting animals on a spit. 'Cob' was not the only word that meant 'spider'. In addition to the aforementioned words that meant 'spider', there was an Old English word, 'loppe' which meant 'spider'. The adjectival ending, '-(e)stre' was added, making 'loppestre' in the sense of 'spider-like' giving us the Modern English word, 'lobster'.

Although the American 1920's were an era of decadence, 'decadence' has nothing to do with time. The word comes from the participle of the Latin, 'decadere', meaning 'to fall', first used in English in the 1530's. Emerging at the same time, and from the same Latin root, 'decay', was used, though it 'decadence' is not a derivative of it. Even older, the word 'chance' comes from 'cadere', also meaning 'to fall'.

Have you ever wondered what the f@*k those symbols used to mask curse-words are? Much like the bleep that is used to hide words that are spoken but found to be in some way offensive in their own right, people use symbols that would be able to be easily typed, but wouldn't have to be the standard spelling. The first uses of this were in comics in the early 1900's. There is no purposeful reason that people use the type of symbols they do, or why people often could fill 'shit' as 's&*t' or 's@^t' with no standard, but the characters themselves were chosen by default because typewriters do not have that many options for characters that aren't letters or common punctuation. The name for these sorts of symbols is 'grawlix' coined by Mort Walker in his 1980 book, The Lexicon of Comicana.

English has two clear words for 'morning' and 'tomorrow', but not every language does: not even English at some points in its history. In German, for example, 'morgen' (which gives us the unit of area, 'morgen': the amount of land plowable in a morning supposedly) means 'morning' but also 'tomorrow'. 'Tomorrow' (as was covered briefly in Word Facts July 9, 2015) comes from 'to' and 'morrow', a rarely used word now, but was widespread in Middle English. 'Morrow' comes from 'morn' (the sounds we hear in 'morrow' come from other declensional forms). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, 'morning' also comes from 'morn', but was modified on the same pattern as 'even+ing'.

It is common to find 'appropriate' as the first definition of 'apt' in a dictionary. Despite their similarity in sound and spelling, 'apt' and 'appropriate' are not from the same word. For starters, they have different roots, but also, 'apt' has a meaning that 'appropriate' does not, "quick to learn". As such, 'inappropriate' is the opposite of something suitable: a negated meaning of both words, but 'inept', the opposite of 'quick to learn" negates only the meaning carried by 'apt'. The change from A to E in 'inept' is just due to old conventions before standardization, but it is still a (direct) derivative.

Plenty of words have no logical antonym: a topic that has been covered several times on this blog. When a word does not follow a pattern, usually reassuring affixation, it is possible to create words. The '-er' suffix, for example, can be used to indicate agency, among other things, but the word 'buttle' was made through backformation from 'butler'. Additionally, the prefix, 'dis-' usually has a positive form, but in the case of 'disgruntle', 'gruntle' was only created humorously in the 1920's.