While reading this week’s Newsweek, I came across the word “trammeled” – context sort of like “the Department of Justice must be free to operate without being trammeled.”
Which struck me, because I don’t think I’d ever seen that word in print (or even spoken) while ‘untrammeled’ pops up fairly often.
Which then brought to mind that the only times I’ve heard/seen the word ‘couth’ it was being used in a mocking, “I realize this isn’t a word, I’m being silly” way.
Are there many words like this? Ones where the ‘root’ word has basically vanished from use, and only lingers inside a un- or non- compound word?
Plenty of them – I’ve seen jokes about “gruntled” people on the Board more than once.
The word “pea” was actually back-formed from the ostensible plural, “pease”, which is never used anymore (now everyone writes “peas”, unless they’re quoting the nursery rhymes about “pease porridge”).
The “in” in *inveterate *isn’t a negative; it’s the Latin prefix in-, related to our preposition in, meaning “to become.” It’s the participle of inveterare, meaning “to grow old,” from vetus, “old.”
When making these things up, one must take care to distinguish the negative in- from this type of in-, lest one’s jokes be peccable.
Damn. I’m not at the computer that has the list. I collect words like that. Maybe I can remember a few.
Effable
Wieldy
Ruthfull
That’s all I’ve got. (And I probably should have checked the New Yorker article.)
Do phrases count? The City is not out of whack. I work for the City, and I can tell you that we have plenty of whack. We may be out of kilter. But I’m sure that the kilter is on back order and will be available soon.
I don’t know about peccable, but I’ve always wanted to be pecunious. (And I won’t say that I’m poverished, because that “im-” is the same as the “in-” in “inveterate”).
How about “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”?
Is there a regular califragilisticexpialidocious? Or is that a subset of fragilisticexpialidocious, which might be a subset of isticexpialidocious?
I’m obviously not a linguist - I got nothing, except for prehensile.
What is a hensile anyway? Could one make it to posthensile without corrective surgery?
