Question!

[conuly]

Why don't some words have logical opposites? We have unruly and ruthless, but one can't be ruly or ruth (okay, that word DOES exist, it means mercy, but it's obsolete). Very few people use the word canny (just me, as far as I can tell, and only around family).

Or what about words that shouldn't have opposites, but should exist, like gress (progress, ingress, egress, regress, agressive, digress, congress....) meaning... um... okay, I know I could just look up the Latin, but let's say it means "go". I like go. It's a fun game. Or movement! It's a fun movement too!

Or what about whelm? That's a real word. It means to turn over dirt or somesuch. Why do we no longer whelm the garden?

*sighs*

Well, there's my plan for the next year. Introduce new-old words back into the English language, via carefully removing prefixes.

Comments

[jean-prouvaire.livejournal.com]

I believe that "-gress" comes from the Latin "egredior." I think it's another word for "to go." (So "progress" means "to go forth," "regress" means "to go back," "digress" means "to go aside," etc.) It made a more convenient root than "ire," because that's all irregular and stupid and nobody wants to have to conjugate it.

*goes off to whelm her garden*

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

-gress is derived from Latin gradi, 'to go'.

Lots of people still say "canny" - "a canny deal", "that wasn't such a canny thing to do", etc. It may be a regional variation; where I live we're quite close to British Columbia, so have a number of Canadian expressions in the local dialect. I haven't seen "whelm" used in reference to gardening, but I've seen it used in reference to emotion.

English is such a weird language because it's patched together from the languages of everyone who ever invaded England, and there were a lot of invasions. It's only gotten weirder since America happened and words like potlach, sushi, glasnost, fatwa and didgeridu started getting added to the stew.

I love it. I think we should add lots of new words, preferably pretty-sounding ones with good rhymes, AND also revive all the cool archaic ones, to build ourselves a language of truly stunning elegance, complexity, and poetic precision.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

I think we should add lots of new words, preferably pretty-sounding ones with good rhymes, AND also revive all the cool archaic ones, to build ourselves a language of truly stunning elegance, complexity, and poetic precision.

I'm with you...