Off With Her Head!
A caller asked why the
word used for decapitation is beheaded instead of deheaded.
This brings up the complicated issue of negative prefixes.
There are many negative
prefixes from which to choose; I have a section on them in my Word Parts Dictionary. The ones that
actually get chosen are often sheer accidents of history. In other words, we
don’t have a rigid and predictable set of rules to determine the choice when we
negate something. While there are a few trends (for instance, un- tends to mean never or not and mis- tends to mean badly), we need to use a
dictionary to determine whether a logically possible negative prefix actually
made it into a word and survived.
Beheaded came from an
Old English word and first appeared in a document around the year 1,000.
Unexpectedly, the word unheaded
coexisted from the 1400s to the 1700s, influenced by a Dutch word meaning to
remove the head. The word dehead
is occasionally used as a synonym for deadhead, a term used by gardeners to
describe the removal of dead or spent flowers to encourage more flowering or to
improve the general appearance of the plant. [Sorry, Jerry.]
A few examples will
illustrate how tricky the process is. If someone is unarmed, she never had a
weapon on her person; if she is disarmed, she had one on her person, but it was
taken away. If a device is unused, it’s probably still in its original
packaging; if it is disused, it is no longer in use, but it could always be
misused.
Unpolitical, apolitical,
and nonpolitical pretty much cover the same territory. If you are uninterested,
you simply don’t care; if you are disinterested, you are impartial and free
from selfish motive. To be unfrocked is to be defrocked. An unregulated
activity is not subject to rules, which also makes it nonregulated; if it is
deregulated, the rules have been lifted, but if it is misregulated, the rules
have been improperly applied.
Unbegotten means not
generated, and misbegotten means ill-conceived. Nontrained help is untrained,
which may be slightly safer than a mistrained person, but it takes a locomotive
to detrain.
And on and on it goes.
Listen to Mike’s
program in real time every Tuesday morning, 9:00 - 10:00 a.m. EST, by going to
wtcmradio.com and clicking on Listen Now.
There is a collection of
podcasts. Go to wtcmradio.com and click on Podcasts. Scroll down The Ron Jolly Show to find the Words to the Wise audio
button.
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