Unpaired word seeks same for LTR

There is a category of words that have affixes but that without them cease to be words. These are called “unpaired” words or sometimes “orphaned” words, though cultural sensitivity is trending heavily toward a preference for the still sad, “unpaired.” They often appear as what seems to be a negative prefix. The classic example is “inert,” meaning “without effect.” There is no word, “ert,” meaning “having an effect,” or meaning anything else at all. Other examples include “nonchalant” and “indelible.” An interesting anomaly is “disgruntled.” Most people think of it as an unpaired word, but "gruntled" indeed means (though its usage is uncommon) pleased or contented.

 

Words can also have suffixes whose absence renders their parent word gibberish. “Reckless” and “feckless” qualify here. Their causes vary, sometimes in their having been borrowed from other languages, while sometimes the word’s root simply resembles a negating affix. Incorrigible readers may feel free to debunk any of this. I will not become discombobulated, nonplussed or overwhelmed; rather your efforts will be considered intrepid and any disambiguation welcome.  

"I'm not an idiot, you imbecile—I'm a moron!"

So goes the punchline of one of the all-time great jokes, describing the conclusion of an argument between two mental patients. Now that the lines of disagreement are wide open across all platforms and the ad hominem is well underway, it’s open season for accusations of cognitive impairment and it's important for you to get yours straight. Alongside all of the well-considered, good-faith debating that happens on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere, there are sometimes invectives, many of which allege some degree of mental incapacitation. The most egregious of these is the R-word, for which there is no reason or excuse. It ought to be extinct as a pejorative.

The three words in the punchline, however, do not carry the clinical sting that the R-word does, largely due to their 50-years hence discontinuance as legitimate psychiatric terminology. They do have a grim past as a single-word characterization of human persons, at least according to Edmund Burke Huey in his dandy little tome, “Backward and Feeble-Minded Children,” published in 1912. 

Huey’s hierarchy is thus: idiots attain intelligence common to a two-year old, imbeciles reach about seven, and morons put the brakes on development at about 12 years of age. In light of this history, they should probably be used with some circumspection, but again, because they had fallen into some disfavor by the late 60s and into utter disuse in the 70s, their capacity for harm is greatly lessened. Of the three, “imbecile” is the least common in Twitter fights. Moe uses it frequently to describe Larry and Curly. 

 

“Idiot” and “moron” enjoy a brisk new life on the internet, with “idiot” returning 207 million instances of use on Google and “moron” clocking in at a respectable 48 million. One presumes there are more idiots than morons. “Idiot” is derived from the Greek and was coined into English some time in the 14^th century. Of the two words, it is the elder by six-hundred years. “Moron” was coined for clinical purposes, and shares an etymology with “sophomore,” for all you morons in your second year of college. 

 

As a disciple of the Moe Howard school of usage, I am trying to reinvigorate use of “imbecile.” Its Google usage cowers conspicuously below the ten million mark, and deserves your support. The other two have had their day, and it’s time. Or you could go with any number of other negative characterizations like birdbrain, dimwit, dunce, frogspawn, nincompoop, squirrel bait or sponge head.

 

We only drop dimes metaphorically now

As the nation’s cosplay patriots are being informed upon willy-nilly across the country (and let’s hear it for the ex-wives), a lovely and anachronistic expression has emerged. In a gangster movie, when you would turn someone in, you might be said to be “dropping a dime” on them. This refers to putting a ten-cent piece into a payphone. The expression experienced its first dissonance when payphone calls went up to 25 cents in the early 1980s. “I’m dropping a quarter on Muggsy Malone,” doesn’t have quite the same zip to it as “dropping a dime.” Now that payphones are a relic and everyone turns each other in free of charge, the phrase has no modern relevance at all. Its use is becoming less and less common, but given the ten-cent payphone’s decades-old disappearance, that it persists at all is testament to its charm. It is one of those rare expressions that has (somewhat) survived the now forty-year gap since its direct relevance.

 

 

It would be a capital idea to capitalize on the common misuse of "capitol"

Events of this week have revealed a horrible patch of ignorance in the United States, one that is usually undone in grammar school. This classic homonymic error happens a dozen times before breakfast in your social media feed, and you don’t want to be the one with egg on their face. I speak of course of “capital" versus "capitol.” Capital means several things: it can refer to accumulated wealth (business equipment purchases require a capital investment), an uppercase letter (a capital “Q” delineates terminal gullibility), or a city that serves as the seat of a country’s or state’s government (the capital of Vermont is Montpelier). Capitol means only one thing: a building in which an entity’s legislature resides. Capitol is reserved only for the building, not the city where the building resides. The capitol is always located in the capital city. The capitalization of “capitol” is another matter! When you reference a capitol building specifically, like when you say, “I am going to storm the United States Capitol,” you do capitalize “capitol.” When you say, “My fellow whackadoodles are going to storm every capitol building in the country,” you do not capitalize “capitol,” as it doesn’t refer to a particular one.  

North, South, East and West qualifiers

 I’m from New England and I live in California. When I refer to my native home, I say “back east,” and when I’m home and referring to my adopted city of Los Angeles, I say, “out west.” You would never say “back west” or “out east.” How did these conventions begin? 

“Back east” and “out west” emerged at approximately the same time, and as you might guess, it was during the western expansion of the United States. The east was the settled area, the known quantity. If you were going west, you were going out west, into the unknown, and if you were coming back, you were headed back east, returning to the familiar. In most sentences, these expressions will serve as adverbs, as they typically modify the verb. In the sentence, "I am going back east," the word "back" offers more details on the verb, "going." If you answer the question, "Where in the heck is he?" by simply saying, "Back East," the word "back" behaves as a preposition.

 

So what of the other chief compass points? It’s “up north” or “down south,” obviously because of a map’s orientation. The word “up” probably ought to refer to a direction away from the center of the Earth, while the word “down” ought to indicate a direction towards it. Our frame of reference for North and South is a physical positioning of up and down, whereas at least as far as adverbial expressions go, the East and West seem more to be derived from a frame of mind.

Verb-verb homophones and homonyms and the past participles who love them

Past participles of verbs are often spelled differently than their homophones and homonyms. Whether the farmer baled hay or the sailor bailed water, they both pronounced it the same, but if they wrote someone about the experience, they spelled it differently. Sometimes they aren't even pronounced the same. The simple past tense of "break" is "broke," whereas the simple past tense of "brake" is "braked." The car braked and the windshield broke. The same is true of the homonyms for "lie." She lay in my bed and lied to me. It’s not true of King Alulim, who some Sumerian texts claim to have been at the throne during the time of Noah’s flood. He reigned until it rained. Homophones in this case. A tangentially related matter is the word "hang," whose past participle changes once it is a means of execution—a picture is hung, a man is hanged. That's gotten a little fuzzy in recent years, but the classic western hangin' judge utterance (and who would know better) is "hanged."

Isaac Parker, the "hanging judge."

A brief history of the term, "social distancing."

Like so many catch phrases in common American parlance, “social distancing” has its roots in elitism and by inevitable extension, racism. The term first appeared in late nineteenth century English newspapers as a means of describing the degrees to which people would countenance exposure to persons of lower ilk. It was a detached and dispassionate expression whose utterer patted himself on the back by choosing it, in his estimation graciously avoiding less charitable descriptions of the subjacent classes. 

It was especially employed in Romeo and Juliet marriages, unions objected to over history, ethnicity, wealth or any of the other many enemies of love. “Social distancing” also became an early 20^th century euphemism for segregation, used by American newspapers wishing to ease northeast liberals’ cognitive dissonance about living in an apartheid state. 

This usage was ideal for the roaring ‘20s, whose blameless separatism was its very character. Indeed, in 1925, “social distancing” graduated from watered-down genteel racism to legitimate science with the introduction of the Social Distance Scale, a tool developed by sociologist Emory S. Bogardus, that measures people’s relative discomfort with other people across marriage, friendship, employment, nationalism and other categories.

Social distancing as a tool to fight pandemics is a 21^st century innovation. Much credit can be claimed by the George W. Bush administration for reacting to the SARS pandemic of 2004 with an open-mindedness to the idea of social distancing as a potentially effective means of mitigating its spread. It was the weapon used by medieval civilizations and our own in 1918, but the prevailing medical opinion at the time was that it was impractical in a modern world and in the end, largely ineffective. This has since been proven untrue. In an essential research paper on the matter published in 2005, Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza, Robert J. Glass’ interdisciplinary team concluded that, “targeted social distancing strategies can be designed to effectively mitigate the local progression of pandemic influenza without the use of vaccine or antiviral drugs.”

By 2004, the CDC was using “social distancing” to describe the minimization of human contact across society. The current push from the CDC is to replace that usage with “physical distancing,” which not only more accurately describes the strategy, it is absent the racist, elitist, nationalist baggage of its parentage. University of Chicago doctoral candidate Lily Scherlis has made a small splash in the word-nerd world with her research on the term, and for the deep dive, she is your go-to. 

Her research pegs a first English usage in 1831 in a letter written by a friend of Napoleon Bonaparte. As Napoleon won more battles, conquered more territory and became more and more lauded in French society, Nap’s old buddy lamented a growing sense of apartness between the two men, a phenomenon he described as “social distancing.” The phrase has had quite a journey. It began with the loss of a friend, found its way into the gritted teeth of embittered snobs and racists who might have preferred “bums” and the “N” word, next into social science laboratories, and lastly into the mouths of epidemiologists, virologists, immunologists and every English-speaking person who breathes air and wonders how in the hell we let this happen.