Palavras órfãs, sem par ou retroformadas / In English: orphaned, unpaired, or backformed words

Em PT, ocorre-me «impávido/a/os/as», porque ninguém diz «pávido» mas existe. Um sinónimo formidável é «impertérrito» mas o contrário será «contérrito».
 

In EN, do check out this wonderful shortest of stories by Jack Winter, as published by The New Yorker eons ago.

Also, "Orphaned, Unpaired, or Backformed: A Journey Through the Peculiar Lexical Evolution of Some English Words" by Alia Pugh. 

 

IT had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate. I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way. I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I’d have to make bones about it, since I was travelling cognito. Beknownst to me, the hostess, whom I could see both hide and hair of, was very proper, so it would be skin off my nose if anything bad happened. And even though I had only swerving loyalty to her, my manners couldn’t be peccable. Only toward and heard-of behavior would do.

Fortunately, the embarrassment that my maculate appearance might cause was evitable. There were two ways about it, but the chances that someone as flappable as I would be ept enough to become persona grata or a sung hero were slim. I was, after all, something to sneeze at, someone you could easily hold a candle to, someone who usually aroused bridled passion.

So I decided not to risk it. But then, all at once, for some apparent reason, she looked in my direction and smiled in a way that I could make heads or tails of.

I was plussed. It was concerting to see that she was communicado, and it nerved me that she was interested in a pareil like me, sight seen. Normally, I had a domitable spirit, but, being corrigible, I felt capacitated—as if this were something I was great shakes at—and forgot that I had succeeded in situations like this only a told number of times. So, after a terminable delay, I acted with mitigated gall and made my way through the ruly crowd with strong givings.

Nevertheless, since this was all new hat to me and I had no time to prepare a promptu speech, I was petuous. Wanting to make only called-for remarks, I started talking about the hors d’oeuvres, trying to abuse her of the notion that I was sipid, and perhaps even bunk a few myths about myself.

She responded well, and I was mayed that she considered me a savory character who was up to some good. She told me who she was. “What a perfect nomer,” I said, advertently. The conversation became more and more choate, and we spoke at length to much avail. But I was defatigable, so I had to leave at a godly hour. I asked if she wanted to come with me. To my delight, she was committal. We left the party together and have been together ever since. I have given her my love, and she has requited it. ♦

We’ve all heard the jokes. “Wow, you’re pretty ept at drawing” or “Don’t be so chalant about this.” What’s going on here? Those aren’t real words!

Orphaned Words

In the evolution of language (and I’m talking about English specifically here — I have less knowledge of how this works in other languages), some words persist, while others get phased out over time as they are used less and less. The words that remain are called orphaned words or phrases. Here are two ways that a word or phrase might become orphaned:

Root Form vs. Affixed Form

In some situations, the root form of a word falls out of use or becomes rare, but the affixed form remains in use. For example, we have impeccable, but we don’t see much of peccable. It technically is a word meaning liable to sin or error, but it’s quite rare.

Loss of Part of a Phrase

In other situations, a word appears in a phrase, but at least one word from the phrase falls out of use or becomes rare, while the phrase itself remains in use. For instance, when’s the last time you used fro (rather than ’fro)? It was probably in the phrase to and fro, not as its own word, right?

Unpaired Words

Like orphaned words, unpaired words seem like they should be related, but either one word doesn’t exist or two existing words are simply not related. Here are two contexts in which that might occur:

Words Adopted from Other Languages

Many words in English are taken from other languages (and vice versa!). Sometimes, as in the case of disgusting, we grab the affixed form, but not the root form. Disgusting came from the Old French desgouster (essentially meaning distaste), which was derived from the Latin gusta, which means taste. We took the Old French desgouster and formed the word family for disgust, and we took the Latin gusta as a root, like in gustatory. But we didn’t take the Old French gouster. So it seems as though we should have a word gusting, meaning pleasing or something similar, but no, sorry.

Words That Look Like They’re Related, but They’re Not

If you put together a list or graphic of all the words in the same word family, naturally you would want to include all the words with the same root. But sometimes words with the same or a similar root aren’t related, or they’re at least not associated with the same meaning. So you get taken by morphology. It’s a tale as old as time, really.

An example here would be discomfit and comfit. Discomfit refers to confusion and dejection, while comfit is a kind of confection. I suppose comfit could cause some discomfit, but they are not antonyms.

Fun with Backformations

Frequently, when word families develop, they start with a root and its basic affixes (-s, -ed, -ing) and then affixes such as -un, mis-, -ation, and so on may be added in the natural use of the word. Sometimes this process is reversed, and we start from a word with an affix and retroactively form a root word.

One you might be familiar with is enthuse, which is a backformation (or back formation or back-formation — we’re still working on the final version for the term’s sesquicentennial anniversary) from enthusiasm. Although enthuse, meaning to cause to become enthusiastic, seems like a new invention of those darn young people, it’s actually a 19th century coinage. I must admit, though, that it is an Americanism. You can’t beat all the language evolution stereotypes.

Sometimes, people or organizations take advantage of this little quirk of language to hilarious effect. Famously, Milwaukee’s Mitchell International Airport has a recombobulation area after security, where you can reshoe yourself and put away your liquids. Honestly, the word recombobulation is the only reason I wrote this post. IT’S SO FUNNY.

There are many other cases, like the Saturday Night Live parody commercial about Sheveled hairspray, which I am devastated to not have found on YouTube.

I’ve purposely provided only one or two examples of each of these linguistic contexts so people can add their own examples in the comments. Please, have at it.