16. Words are created by adding or subtracting some thing

English has more than a hundred common prefixes and suffixes -able,

anti-, and so on—and with these it can form and reform words

with a facility that yet again sets it apart from other tongues. For example, we

can take the French word mutin (rebellion) and turn it into mutiny, mutinous,

mutinously, mutineer, and many others, while the French have still just the one

form, mutin.

We are astonishingly indiscriminate in how we form our cornpounds, sometimes

adding an Anglo-Saxon prefix or suffix to a Greek or Latin root (plainness,

sympathizer), and sometimes vice versa (readable, disbelieve). [Examples cited

by Burchfield, . This inclination to use affixes

and infixes provides gratifying flexibility in creating or modifying words to fitnew uses, as strikingly demonstrated in the word incomprehensibility, which

consists of the root hen and eight affixes and infixes: in, corn, pre, s, ib, il, it, and

-y. Even more melodic is the musical term quasihemidemisemiquaver, which

describes a note that is equal to 128th of a semibreve.

As well as showing flexibility it also promotes confusion. We have six ways of

making labyrinth into an adjective: labyrinthian, labyrinthean, labyrinthal,

labyrinthine, labyrinthic, and labyrinthical. We have at least six ways of

expressing negation with prefixes: a-, anti-, in-, im-, it-, un-, and non-. It is

arguable whether this is a sign of admirable variety or just untidiness. It must be

exasperating for foreigners to have to learn that a thing unseen is not unvisible,

but invisible, while something that cannot be reversed is not inreversible but

irreversible and that a thing not possible is not nonpossible or antipossible but

impossible. Further-more, they must learn not to make the elementary mistake of

assuming that because a word contains a negative suffix or prefix it is

necessarily a negative word. In-, for instance, almost always implies negation

but not with invaluable, while -less is equally negative, as a rule, but not with

priceless. Things are so confusing that even native users have shown signs of

mental fatigue and left us with two forms meaning the same thing: flammable

and in-flammable, iterate and reiterate, ebriate and inebriate, habitable and

inhabitable, durable and perdurable, fervid and perfervid, gather and forgather,

ravel and unravel.

Some of our word endings are surprisingly rare. If you think of angry and

hungry, you might conclude that -gry is a common ending, but in fact it occurs in

no other common words in English.

Similarly -dous appears in only stupendous, horrendous, tremendous, hazardous,

and jeopardous, while -lock survives only in wed-lock and warlock and -red only

in hatred and kindred. Forgiveness is the only example of a verb + -ness form.

Equally some common seeming prefixes are actually more rare than superficial

thought might lead us to conclude. If you think of forgive, forget, forgo, forbid,

forbear, forlorn, forsake, and forswear, you might think that for-is a common

prefix, but in fact it appears in no other common words, though once it appeared

in scores of others. Why certain forms like -ish, -ness, -ful, and -some should

continue to thrive while others like -lock and -gry that were once equally popular

should fall into disuse is a question without a good answer.Fashion clearly has something to do with it. The suffix -dom was long in danger

of disappearing, except in a few established words like kingdom, but it

underwent a resurgence (largely instigated in America) in the last century, giving

us such useful locutions as officialdom and boredom and later more contrived

forms like best-sellerdom. The ending -en is today one of the most versatile

ways we have of forming verbs from adjectives (harden, loosen, sweeten, etc.)

and yet almost all such words are less than 300 years old.

Nor is there any discernible pattern to help explain why a particular affix

attaches itself to a particular word or why some creations have thrived while

others have died of neglect. Why, for instance, should we have kept disagree but

lost disadorn, retained impede but banished expede, kept inhibit but rejected

cohibit?

The process is still perhaps the most prolific way of forming new words and

often the simplest. For centuries we had the word political, but by loading the

single letter a onto the front of it, a new word, apolitical, joined the language in

1952.

Still other words are formed by lopping off their ends. Mob, for example, is a

shortened form of mobile vulgus (fickle crowd). Exam, gym, and lab are similar

truncations, all of them dating only from the last century when syllabic

amputations were the rage. Yet the impulse to shorten words is an ancient one.

Finally, but no less importantly, English possesses the ability to make new words

by fusing compounds—airport, seashore, foot-wear, wristwatch, landmark,

flowerpot, and so on almost endlessly. All Indo-European languages have the

capacity to form compounds. Indeed, German and Dutch do it, one might say, to

excess. But English does it more neatly than most other languages, eschewing

the choking word chains that bedevil other Germanic languages and employing

the nifty refinement of making the elements reversible, so that we can

distinguish between a houseboat and a boathouse, between basketwork and a

workbasket, between a casebook and a bookcase. Other languages lack this

facility.