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.<\/p>\n
For example, a “pensity”can mean a feeling about doing something, but maybe not a favorable one.<\/p>\n
A “pinquity” means you’re somewhere, but you might not be very close.<\/p>\n
If something is “nounced”, then there’s a certain amount of it, but not necessarily a lot.<\/p>\n
And if a thing is “tected”, then it probably needs defending, but it might be out of luck.<\/p>\n
To “ject” means to extend, but maybe not very far.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Now I’m going to be “lix”, so this doesn’t go on for too long.<\/p>\n
One could easily imagine replacing “pro” with some other value-laden prefix, but that could all too quickly become a con-game. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading “Gone pro”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6426"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6426"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6431,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6426\/revisions\/6431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}