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 Sun Aug 20, 2006 10:21 am 'Betwixt', 'amiss': active vocabulary? |
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Hi Tamara
Amiss is a "normal" word for me but betwixt sounds quite unusual. (AmE!)
Amy
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| Sun Aug 20, 2006 10:59 am Amiss |
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Hi Tamara,
Amiss is all right. Makes me think of the saying A miss is as good as a mile - totally irrelevant but had to say it.
Betwixt is an archaic form and probably is best known in the pair betwixt and between meaning neither one nor the other. If you are betwixt and between jobs, it means you haven't actually got a job at the moment, you've left one and are hoping to get another one very soon. It also pops up as twixt in the saying:
| Quote: | There's many a slip twixt cup and lip. (literary)
something that you say in order to warn someone not to be too confident about the result of a plan, because many things can go wrong before it is completed. We still might finish in time for the deadline, but there's many a slip twixt cup and lip. |
Alan
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Tamara
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| Sun Aug 20, 2006 13:26 pm Bewitch :) |
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| Tamara wrote: | Some old English words look so charming and are attractive (for me). All those 'thee', etc.
So... bewitching  |
They are so attractive that there have been books published listing archaic words in English that have been lost but not replaced by anything. They would still be useful, except that no one uses or understands them. There was one old word I heard a long time ago that was a term for a clown who is trying too hard to be funny but is just embarrassing. I need this word frequently, but alas it is not in the language anymore. (I can't remember the word itself now.) |
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Jamie (K)
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| Mon Aug 21, 2006 9:56 am Trickster and trick-ster |
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Hi Jamie
Concerning another (survived) old word (and an ancient character) that bewitched my mind:
one of my recent - very! interesting - excursion to history (mythology) was called by the word Trickster used by my Russian friend – he is a psychotherapist – to name an archetype.
I’ve found some 'etymological' sources (and some quite impressive old pictures) and now I know a bit more about it.
But what about the suffix –ster?
English contains many words with '-ster'.
On the one hand, it seems to be quite anxious.
On the other hand, I see it to be 'fashionably' used to create brand names…
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Tamara
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| Mon Aug 21, 2006 10:52 am Trickster and trick-ster |
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| Tamara wrote: | But what about the suffix –ster?
English contains many words with '-ster'.
On the one hand, it seems to be quite anxious.
On the other hand, I see it to be 'fashionably' used to create brand names… |
Some suffixes go almost dead, only to be revived again for no apparent reason. When I was in graduate school, the suffix -dom, as in kingdom, Christendom, freedom, etc., was used in textbooks as a classic example of a suffix that had become completely nonproductive. They said the suffix appeared only on words that had only had been formed centuries ago. After that, I suddenly found that people -- especially in advertising -- were forming new words with it again. You'll hear words like truckdom, geekdom, and many other new coinages. |
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Jamie (K)
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Tamara
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| That’s it! vs That’s that! | The idiom 'let off the hook' |
