Prefix

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Martha. Hey, Grant. This is Matt from Oak Park, Illinois.

Hi, Matt. Welcome.

Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Well, I had a question about the dual nature of the prefix in-i-n. And by that I mean, in most cases, when you put that before a word, it changes the word to the opposite meaning.

So, for example, inactive is the opposite of active. Insensitive is the opposite of insensitive, or, you know, absensitive, etc., etc. And I’ve actually made a whole list of them. And that’s in most cases that I can think of, but there were three cases that came up where it does kind of the opposite thing, where it makes it a synonym.

And the one that occurred to me was inflammable. And then somebody on your Facebook page also put in invaluable, and my wife brought up ingenious. So I’m wondering, and it becomes, I don’t know if it’s an exact synonym, but it basically is the same meaning. So I’m wondering why that is.

That’s a really good question. Invaluable is the best case here, I think, that can explain that sometimes the negation is happening in there, but we just don’t know how to get to the root of it. Invaluable, if you want to break it down, basically it means you cannot, there’s the negative, calculate the value. It’s so valuable that you cannot put the price.

I never thought about it that way. So in is still doing the negative work there. And in the case of inflammable…

Like priceless.

Priceless, very good. In the case of inflammable, that classic word where inflammable and inflammable mean the same thing, it’s inflame took the BLE suffix. So it doesn’t actually have quite the negation because it’s a completely different IN prefix. It’s inflameable. It’s the same as the EN prefix, but it’s spelled IN. So it means to break into flame. So that’s the problem with inflammable is the IN is not a negation.

Okay. And then with ingenious, I have no idea. But it’s probably something similar like that. The thing is, there are all these different prefixes in English that are spelled I-N. There’s at least three that I know of that come from different etymological roots. And as a matter of fact, the I-N prefix has become corrupted. So it’s actually spelled a bunch of different ways.

So the I-L, for example, in front of illegible is basically the I-N prefix. Oh, okay. Yeah, or in front of illegitimate. I want to recommend a website to you, which is beautiful and wonderful, and it’s all about affixes. That’s what these are called. Words that go on the front or the end or in the middle of words are called affixes, and it is affixes.org, A-F-F-I-X-E-S dot O-R-G, and it’s by a British lexicographer and language expert, Michael Quinian. And he just explains this stuff so wonderfully. It’s very comprehensible.

So, Matt, spend an afternoon with that and get back to us.

I will do exactly that. I appreciate the information.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks for calling, Matt.

Bye-bye.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Have a good one.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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