Behead vs. Decapitate, Be- vs. De-

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Martha and Grant. This is Carl. I’m calling from Newport Beach, California, but I live up in Sonoma County in Sebastopol, California.

Oh, okay.

And I’m calling because I would like you to tell us a tale of two prefixes. Now, if we think back to the French Revolution or the Tudor period in English history, we know that a lot of people were decapitated. But those same people were beheaded. They weren’t deheaded. And you would think that deheaded would have described pretty accurately what happened to them.

And then the situation gets stranger to me when we consider the word befriend, because in befriend, we’re clearly adding a friend to someone’s life, not removing one. And then it gets stranger still when we consider words like be moan or be labor, where the be prefix isn’t about adding or subtracting. It seems to be more about intensifying or modifying. But then the prefix d also works that way sometimes, as in the word decry. So could you tell us what’s going on with b and d?

Yeah, this is a big morass and pretty complicated for what we’re going to do here. It really needs to be written down. But, Carl, it sounds like you’ve put a lot of thought into this. Why are you thinking about something as gruesome as beheading?

You know, I just like words, and I am one of your success stories. You have changed the way I think about language.

Okay.

And I just think about more things since I’ve started listening to A Way with Words.

Oh, that’s nice. That’s wonderful. Maybe we’ll just think about beheading, say, flowers, which is also not nice, but better than anything animal related or humans.

Yeah. So one of the things you’ve got to first grasp here is that all of those prefixes you mentioned, let’s go ahead and talk about B-E and D-E and also add dis in there, D-I-S. So these three prefixes all do similar functions, but they’re not identical. And they all have more than one use. So this is going to resolve a lot of the difficulties you have with wondering why we use one prefix and not the other. And they seem to be the same, but they’re not the same because they’re not the same. And they have different life stories.

It is interesting to note that DE prefix and DIS prefix probably both originally come from Greek and Latin roots meaning two, such as to divide by two or to separate into two pieces. And the B, however, comes from a Germanic root. And actually that B prefix is incredibly common in German, in modern German. But it also appears in a variety of forms in the other Germanic languages like Swedish and Norwegian, Dutch, Icelandic, and so forth.

And I don’t really want to spend too long talking about this. But when we talk about behead here, that be prefix in this case is talking about removal or privation, to use a fancy word for it, but separating. But that be prefix doesn’t always do that. For example, if I befriend you, it’s because I’m turning a noun friend into the verb befriend, right? So that’s one use of be that is not the same as the be, which means to separate. And there are others. Sometimes we use it for intensification or to make verbs from adjectives. Notice that in two cases here, we’re talking about changing the part of speech and that be prefix does that. And sometimes we just talk about coverage or surrounding or overall application, too. Like if I bedaub a building with clay, that means I’m putting clay all over the building. Or you bedazzle something.

Right. I bedazzle my jean jacket so it says cool dude on the back. So this is really what we’re talking about. So remember the two fundamental things here when it comes to this. One is prefixes, just like words, often have more than one meaning. And prefixes, just like words, have their own stories. And true synonymy is really impossible to find in English. Words that are absolutely 100% the same. For example, to behead and decapitate on the surface are synonyms. They both mean to separate the head of something from its body. But they have different contexts. One’s more formal. One’s more informal. One’s a little more archaic. One’s a little more modern, one’s Germanic and one’s Latinate.

So is the difference between the Germanic and the Latinate root related to the meaning of the prefix? Does B tend to have one meaning more with Germanic roots than with Latinate roots?

Yeah, the B traditionally, although of course in modern times it’s all mixed up, but traditionally the B was only found as a prefix on Germanic originating words. And otherwise, if it was a Latinate root, you would use dis, D-I-S, or D-D-E to indicate kind of almost the same thing, but not quite the same thing.

That makes a lot of sense. Carl, I want to recommend a website before we go. Michael Quinian, who is a British lexicographer and language researcher, has a wonderful website, affixes.org, A-F-F-I-X-E-S.org, where he explains many of the common prefixes in English. And it’s a very reputable site, and he does a great job.

Super.

I will look it up.

Great. There’s your weekend right there. Thank you so much for calling, Carl. And keep your head on.

I will definitely do that. You guys, too. Love talking with you. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Carl.