Recently I got into a discussion with a friend on that time-honored topic of interesting new words that emerge if you drop a prefix. In particular, words that begin with “pro” are intriguing, because that first syllable seems to infer a positive value. Without those three little letters, the resulting neologisms can become unmoored in all sorts of ways.
For example, a “pensity”can mean a feeling about doing something, but maybe not a favorable one.
A “pinquity” means you’re somewhere, but you might not be very close.
If something is “nounced”, then there’s a certain amount of it, but not necessarily a lot.
And if a thing is “tected”, then it probably needs defending, but it might be out of luck.
To “ject” means to extend, but maybe not very far.
A person in a story can be a “tagonist”, which means we feel some way or other about them, but we’re not really sure how.
Now I’m going to be “lix”, so this doesn’t go on for too long.
One could easily imagine replacing “pro” with some other value-laden prefix, but that could all too quickly become a con-game. 😉
This reminds me of a friend’s recent Facebook status:
“Pros and cons: Some days I feel like a pro, other days, I feel like a con.”