Polite Dissent

15 Responses to “ Ponderables #8 – Missing Words ”

1. Gareth Wilson
   March 6th, 2005 at 3:37 pm
   

   The only place I’ve read someone described as “ept” is on usenet.
   But it’s just as useful as “inept”.

2. N
   March 6th, 2005 at 3:52 pm
   

   If memory serves, Groo is always insisting he is “ept.”

   People are indolent (lazy), but never dolent.

   Was Crisis inevitable? No, the heroes proved it was evitable.

   You can defray costs, but what how do you fray them?

   A naive person is ingenuous, but who is genuous?

   This is starting to sound like a Carlin routine.

3. Lee "budgie" Barnett
   March 6th, 2005 at 5:29 pm
   

   Although the word is still in existence, I’ve never heard anyone ever described as “couth”, but I have heard people, usually teenagers, described as “uncouth”.

4. Nick
   March 6th, 2005 at 6:41 pm
   

   I’ve heard of people being nonplussed, but never plussed.

5. Tom
   March 7th, 2005 at 9:17 am
   

   I’ve always wondered about gruntled workers. The kind that never cause any problems later on… Also, I’ve never thought about doing anything advertently.

6. Zoot Koomie
   March 7th, 2005 at 12:38 pm
   

   According to the Mr. Wordwizard column by David Grambs, these are known as lost positives, although many of them never were. For instance, ept was never a word, but couth, nocuous, mantle and wieldy were, but have fallen into disuse.

   A related phenomenon is back-formation, where a new word is formed by mistakenly subtracting what eppears to be a
   prefix or suffix from a word. Some examples: burgle, diagnose, edit and peeve.

7. Mark Simmons
   March 7th, 2005 at 2:25 pm
   

   I’m reminded of Jack Winter’s (in)famous humor piece “How I Met My Wife”. “It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate…”

   Here’s the full text: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/how-i-met-my-wife.html

8. Bob
   March 7th, 2005 at 5:38 pm
   

   Superman often mocks other heroes on how vincible they are.

9. Matthew Clark
   March 8th, 2005 at 1:52 am
   

   Not a real one but in the same spirit (stolen from the simpsons)

   They call them fingers but you never see them fing!

10. Ratbat
    March 8th, 2005 at 8:14 am
    

    I knew someone who used ‘couth’ on a regular basis, but she had a penchant for old-fashioned/obscure words.

    And – eep! – I say ‘ept’! Originally when I was very young, I read an inept/’ept’ side-gag in a B.C. comic, and didn’t realise until they’d sunk into my diction that ‘ept’ wasn’t the real term…

    (Of course, there’s always our old favourites, flammable and inflammable.)

11. Carl Fink
    March 8th, 2005 at 5:24 pm
    

    My favorite back-formation is “pea”. The original word for those green legumes was “pease”, which wasn’t a plural of anything (like “sheep”) but because it ended with a z-sound, people assumed it was a plural and constructed the singular.

12. Erich
    March 10th, 2005 at 6:49 am
    

    Not quite the same thing, but it’s always struck me as odd that it’s “self-destruct” but “destroy” when it’s done to anything besides one’s self. Not to mention that its opposite is always “construct” but never “constroy”…

13. Erich
    March 12th, 2005 at 8:13 am
    

    And when’s the last time you heard about somebody doing something “advertently”?

14. Joe R
    March 12th, 2005 at 9:35 am
    

    I like people who think “kudos” is a plural so they offer someone “a kudo”

15. Erich
    April 6th, 2005 at 9:54 pm
    

    I know this topic’s been dormant for a while, but I just wanted to mention a bit I saw in an improv comedy performance recently. One character had promised another that he’d expunge his criminal record, but later revealed that he’d pulled a double-cross: “When I said I expunged, I only punged.”

Leave a Reply