This week’s theme
Anti-words

This week’s words
wrongous
eupnea
postposition
apocryphal
anergy

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.” ~Beecher
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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(post-puh-ZISH-uhn)

MEANING:

noun:
1. The placing of something after another.
2. Something placed in this manner, especially a word or an element placed after another.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin post- (after) + position, from ponere (to put). Ultimately from the Indo-European root apo- (off or away), which is also the source of pose, apposite, after, off, awkward, post, puny, appose, depose, repose, interpose, apposite, apropos, eftsoons, postiche, and pungle. Earliest documented use: 1546.

NOTES:

In English we have prepositions. One might say “I live in NY.” Here, the word “in” is a preposition because it’s positioned before “NY” to which it refers. In some languages, such as Hindi, they are placed after the words they relate to and are known as postpositions.
In English we put adjectives before a noun, as in, hot coffee, but in some languages, such as French, adjectives go after the noun: café chaud. Sometimes we put adjectives postpositively in English too. See here, here, and here.
You may preposition an adjective or postposition it, but please do not proposition it, unless you know it intimately.

USAGE:

“What did Nazareth know? Thousands of verb endings. Tens of thousands of postpositions. She wanted to know what other women knew, and she had set about closing the gap.”
Suzette Haden Elgin; The Judas Rose; DAW; 1987.

See more usage examples of postposition in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: