This week's theme brought to mind a list some British friends kept of words which implied a counterpart, but where the original was not generally in use.

I believe it started with gormless - what is a "gorm"?

From the Middle English gome 'notice' < from Old Norse gaumr 'heed, attention' (link, link, & link).

Okay. I wonder can we start it back up: "Johnny was gormy when the blond walked by."?

Hello brave Margot. Is there much else in this than taking a word ending with -less and then taking the the first part of it adding a -y ? I just try to think... I mean, are there more possibilities than just adding or dropping suffixes?

as shown by the following, that's the easy route:

I know a little man both ept and ert.
An intro-? extro-? No, he's just a vert.
Sheveled and couth and kempt, pecunious, ane,
His image trudes upon the ceptive brain.

When life turns sipid and the mind is traught,
The spirit soars as I would sist it ought.
Chalantly then, like any gainly goof,
My digent self is sertive, choate, loof.

Gloss, by David McCord
The Oxford Book of American Light Verse


[where would you begin, in any wise‽]

I (very) recently did a theme week on lost positives (or not); since it's not inapt, I'll post some here.

the worthless word for the day is: sheveled

[by shortening] (also shevelled)
rare, archaic disheveled

"He bowed his tall white head into my shevelled hair."
- Richard Blackmore, Erema (1877)

"After the prisoner was delivered to Lexington the
next day in sheveled and humbled state, the posse was
dismissed..."
- Reese Prescott; The Rockbridge County Gazette, June 28, 1904

(but)
"She was a descript person, a woman in a state of
total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled,
and she moved in a gainly way."
- Jack Winter; The New Yorker, 25 July 1994

"Is sheveled the opposite of disheveled? Recreational
linguists call these words lost positives."
- Charles Elster, What in the Word? (2005)
___

you never know how a prefix is going to affect things;
some expect that sheveled existed as a positive form
(as happened with couth and kempt), but in this case
the word was formed (as per OED) by aphesis. link

fwiw, here's a link to the previously cited New Yorker article: link

I remember the delight when I first encountered this device in Samuel Beckett's *Watt* where the attempt to 'eff the ineffable' seemed to be integral to Beckett's work, while at the very same moment he despaired of being able to communicate anything effectively. To eff or not?
I always wondered if there was also a reference to the 'F-word' here... Does anyone know when that became common usage?

So what was the pre-aphesized version of sheveled?

Hi Shelley, I don't know when it became common but it's too common now for my ear.

Apt, but sham, tsuwm. There is no such word in the Wwftd-list. No sheveled and no disheveled and I can't find it anywhere. The OneLook collection gives nothing on it. Only shoveled and that one I know. ( but funny articles and verse, these.. )

I *said it was recent. onelook often doesn't catch up to me for months!

I * meant, your own list does not have it. There is 'shebeen' and 'shend' but../and I do not keep or remember all the words that pass as I rely on that list. So farewell 'di/sheveled'.

sheveled was posted 4/7/09; I'm only now updating the list for Mar/Apr. <sigh> disfortunately, these things don't happen automagically.

disfortunately

It should be remembered that the dis- in disheveled and disgruntled is not a negating prefix but an intensive. The OED definition of sheveled (and the definition given in tsuwm's wwftd list) matches that of disheveled. Gruntled is not listed on its own in the OED but it's related to the second meaning of the verb definition for gruntle, 'to grumble, murmur, complain.'

the dis-

It means something like 'apart from'. (In Italian s- < Latin dis- has come to be a rather productive prefix.) These affixes go all fuzzy semantic. For example, the tendency in Romance and Germanic languages (at least) to use diminutive suffixes to connote cuteness and friendliness, while the augmentatives are pejorative. (It just dawned on me towonder if the typical prefix sh- in Yiddish is related.)

the worthless word for the day (Apr. 8) is: flappable

[back-formation from unflappable (1968)]
lacking self-assurance and self-control: easily upset
(a lost positive of the 2nd kind: jocular)

"The existence of back-formed words such as flappable
from unflappable. In the word-based hypothesis, this
would have to be formed by the prefixation of un- to
an already existing flappable, which contradicts its
back-formation origin."
- Pavol Stekauer, English Word Formation (2000)
(the theory being that unflappable was formed
out of whole cloth; i.e., un- + flap + -able)

""Now that," said Milo.. "is what I call a shrink.
Unflappable, soft-spoken, analyzing everything."
"I don't qualify?"
"You, my friend, are an aberration."
"Too flappable?""
- Jonathan Kellerman, Therapy (2005)

"I'm the sort of flappable American who leaves
everything until the last minute."
- Benjamin Cheever, Strides (2007)

In the case of inept the non-negative word is apt. One of them underwent some sort of vowel shift.

One of them underwent some sort of vowel shift.

The change happened in Latin before the words migrated to English: aptus 'suitable' and ineptus 'foolish; awkward'. Go blame it on the Romans with their vulgar tongues.

gorn?

:¬ )

>gorn

and the negated form? ingorn? ungorn?? disgorn?!

Would this be a sort of backwards umlaut, where, rather than the back vowel being fronted in anticipation of a following front vowel it's fronted in reaction to a leading front vowel?

I think of umlaut more in the context of Germanic languages, though it happens sporadically in Romance, too. Cf. Genoese: ō can /u kaŋ/ 'the dog', i chen /i kɛŋ/ 'the dogs'. I have seen umlaut used in the literature though in reference to other languages, e.g., an Arabic dialect.

the worthless word for the day (Apr. 9) is: fatigable

[fr. L. fatigare, to fatigue] /FAT uh guh bul/
subject to fatigue; easily tired: defatigable
(where defatigable was truly lost, and then
back-formed from indefatigable; where de- is
used to intensify and in- to negate)

"It is evident that the idea of any kind of play
can only be associated with the idea of an
imperfect, childish, and fatigable nature."
- John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (1853)

"He was fatigable, and often desperately
fatigued, but he persisted..."
- Hershel Parker, Herman Melville (2005)

"I was always the most defatigable of hacks."
- Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One (1948)

Do I understand right that defatigable is more fatigable than
fatigable?

Ha! Indefatigable. Even though I do not keep a special word as a favorite indefatigable is one I really specially like. It's a smooth running word and also the name of Captain Hornblower's ship in the TV serial 'Captain Hornblower'. The Indefatigable also called the 'Indee'. A truly invincible word. Is vincible in use?

>Do I understand right that defatigable is more fatigable than
fatigable?

it should be noted that the use of the prefix de- in a non-negative sense (such as where it indicates completely, as in denude) almost always indicates a Latinate form came first (denudare).

the worthless word for the day (Apr. 10) is: crastinate

[fr. L. crastinum, tomorrow] obs.
= procrastinate, delay
(hence crastination = procrastination)

so why procrastinate? the prefix was added in classical
Latin procrastinare, to put off until the morrow.
crastinate seems to be just an inkhorn term, from L. crastinum, morrow.

"And try, by pray'rs, and vows, and floods of tears,
To crastinate their sure impending doom."
- Richard Dagley, (from) Death's Doings (1828)

""I am trying to crastinate, so I can stay here long
enough to find out what is so infernally important about
your quest.""
- Piers Anthony, Swell Foop (2002)

-tsuwm
http://home.comcast.net/~wwftd

As still try to get it right what about this one. It seems to have a negative (?) as well as a positive (?) meaning:

Main Entry: de·pose
Pronunciation: \di-&#712;p&#333;z, d&#275;-\
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): de·posed; de·pos·ing
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French deposer, from Late Latin deponere (perfect indicative deposui), from Latin, to put down
Date: 14th century
transitive verb
1: to remove from a throne or other high position
2: to put down : deposit
3 [Middle English, from Medieval Latin deponere, from Late Latin] a: to testify to under oath or by affidavit b: affirm, assert c: to take a deposition of <depose a witness>
intransitive verb
: to bear witness

btw, the same positive/negative seems to go with dis·pose

these are all just shaded senses of to put (poser) down (de-) [sense 3 also exists in the word depone]

Something I've wondered for a while: is depose a back-formation of deposition?

Deponere, a word of shady, shady dispostion.

According to the AHD it's been a verb in its own right since we got it from Old French.