Here is another case where two words differ in American/British meaning based on an extra E: STORY and STOREY.
You can tell a STORY, it's a piece of narration or fiction, or a news story. I don't normally think of it as a verb, but it can be. I would normally say I was telling a STORY, but I could be STORYING. Having finished the STORY, I suppose I am all STORIED out. But, STORIED fits as an adjective too: if many stories have been told about you, you have lived a STORIED life.
STOREY is a floor in a house, and to make matters a little more complex, in the British Isles, what we call the first floor (Am) is the ground floor and our second floor is their first storey (floor). A taller building could have multiple STOREYS. Merriam-Webster says that this STOREY is just a less common version of STORY, but it always felt to me like a specifically British version. Cambridge has STOREYED, which would be used as an adjective, as in "a three-storeyed house."
There is a certain amount of linguistic Zen that comes from playing simple word unscrambler games, spinning around the question of why some words are accepted and others are not. A few nights back we played UNRULY, and for fun, I tried RULY on a whim, and the game accepted it, when I know other games have rejected it. I tried explaining it to Anne. It felt like a word to me, and it's in Merriam-Webster with the same example I thought of at the time: "I have seen some ruly crowds." It turns out that MW has a fascinating story about these two words, see here . "Ruly" did exist for centuries, got replaced by UNRULY, only to come back as a back-formation from UNRULY to fill the gap it once filled. It turns out that these cases are considered "Lost positives", words where the positive root word has faded from usage while the negation of the word is still going strong. Here is a video from RobWords that gives a good overview. I have been enjoy...
Comments
Post a Comment