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 enjoying his content a lot, and hope to discuss some other episodes soon.
A google NGram shows "ruly" was barely a blip at any time since 1800, with "unruly" being between 40 to 400 times as common. Oddly, UNRULY sounds pretty commonly used to me, but it took a big dip from 1840 to 1970 and has rebounded since then.
There are a lot of other words that feel the same, like INEPT being a thing, but you cannot be "ept". In this case, the word is actually a variant of INAPT, the opposite of APT. This is the most interesting NGram out of today's batch, since in 1846, the two lines cross at 0.000015%, and again in 1895 at 0.00001%, though today the two are at: 0.000069% INEPT and 0.0000062 INAPT (1/10 as common but neither word is dead). Being able to compare the word counts on these millions of documents is fascinating. Here you go.
You can be NONCHALANT but nobody is "chalant"* anymore. "Chalant" it not entirely missing, though, but never more than 0.000015%, where NONCHALANT has spiked by a factor of 8X since 1980.
You can be RECKLESS and there is a verb and archaic adjective "reck" (to worry or care for), but you can not "reckful"*. Again, you can conjure a Google NGram to see the usage rise and fall, and there is a tiny tiny trace of "reckful", with this entertaining quote from "The Political Economy of the Bible" in "The North British Review, Volume 2, 1845": "Man should be reckless in nothing, but reckful in every thing; and the only question is, what, in the concern of marriage is it, that he should reck or reckon upon?" It does a fine job of showing how the words support and oppose each other. I did not even think of RECKON as a now obvious relative.
The few remaining cases in the entire Google corpus sound equally like plays on words.
INNOCENT vs "nocent"? Well, "nocent" was around in the 15th century, and Rob gives an example from 1685 (meaning "harmful"), but INNOCENT is by far the more widely used word. A google Ngram has NOCENT barely used at all after 1860.
UNCOUTH vs COUTH? Though Rob says COUTH is obsolete, MW has both words, even with modern examples of COUTH, but COUTH still sounds like a relic. A Google Ngram (1800-2022) shows COUTH peaked at 0.00003% in 1807 and dropped to nearly zero (0.000001%) since then, even UNCOUTH has dropped signifcantly (0.0002% in 1853 down to 0.00005% in 2022).
UNCOUTH had 9X the usage of COUTH in 1807 and was 28X as common in 2022.
INCESSANT vs "cessant"*. "Cessant" did show up as a blip on the radar in the early 1800s, peaking around 0.000005%, while INCESSANT rose up to a peak of 0.0006% in 1837 (100x as common as "cessant"), and has declined greatly since then, hitting 0.00019% in 2022, 500X as frequent as the tiny trace of "cessant" that is still measurable, but only 1/3 as common as it was at its peak.
I just wanted to bring up this fascinating category of words, and trace them with some of the tools at hand.
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* These are not in Merriam-Webster online. When I try to do a deeper dive into the dozens of available dictionaries on any words, it gets confusing. MW feels like a good middle-of-the-road non-specialist source. Again, what makes a word truly a word?
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