The Prefix Perplex

I was standing in a long, stationary line at the San Francisco Film Festival, indulging in my favorite waiting-in-line activity: eavesdropping. Directly behind me were a 50-something man and his 20-something daughter, good-naturedly arguing about the correct use of the word infamous. Dad maintained that infamous could mean extremely famous, while Daughter insisted that infamous really meant something more like heinous. The example they were using was footwear designer Christian Louboutin, whose shoes always have red soles. Dad called them "the infamous red soles," while Daughter claimed they were merely "famous."

Well, score one for Gen Y. Louboutin's soles would be infamous only if they were implicated in a triple homicide, or if toxic red dye seeped upward and caused horrific foot burns, or in some other equally dire scenario. Infamous means "notorious, ill-famed, having an exceedingly bad reputation." It even has legal definitions:

a. Punishable by severe measures, such as death, long imprisonment, or loss of civil rights.

b. Convicted of a crime, such as treason or felony, that carries such a punishment.

The overheard conversation got me thinking more generally about the way people use prefixes in English. As children, we were told never to use irregardless to mean regardless: the former, we learn,"isn't a word." (Of course, it is a word, probably blended from irrespective and regardless, but it's considered substandard and illogical, not to mention redundant: both the ir- prefix and the -less suffix have the same negative meaning.) Regardless, people still carry on saying irregardless. As with infamous, the extra syllable must make the word sound ... I don't know. Smarter? Stronger? Fancier?

Then there's penultimate, which means "next to last," as in, "Y is the penultimate letter in the alphabet." Yet penultimate is often used to mean "really, really ultimate--absolutely the very last word!"

I'm wondering whether some people think that adding any prefix to a word intensifies its meaning. Do some of us yearn to agglutinate words, to pile on the parts and make our language more Germanesque?

Maybe the prefixizers are following the example of invaluable, in which the prefix does act as an intensifier. Invaluable means not simply "of value"--for that, we could use valuable--but "beyond calculation," "incapable of being valued," "priceless."

Can anyone suggest other such words? Or additional examples of prefix abuse?

Comments

[goofy]

Michael Quinion notes that there are many examples of reduplication of negative affixes from the 16th and 17th centuries, like unboundless, undauntless, uneffectless, unfathomless.

Nowadays we have unloose, unpick, undecipher, debone, unravel, unthaw, irradiate, where prefix is redundant, and was perhaps added for emphasis.

Like invaluable, we have imperil, endanger, immingle where the prefix acts as an emphasizer.

I'm inclined to think that adding a prefix for emphasis is a normal part of English, since we like to do it so much. And of course redundancy is an essential feature of language.

[John]

Except, of course, that "invaluable" _is_ a negation: "cannot be valued" or "beyond value". The intensification comes from the negation. The stupidest example I know of this one is "inflammable", which appears to mean precisely the same as "flammable" - perhaps from "to inflame"?

Goofy:
"Irradiate" means something different to "radiate", at least in science. To "radiate" means that an object gives out radation, often light - the Sun is radiant, it radiates light. To "irradiate" something means to expose it to radiation - "the sample was irradiated under an ultraviolet lamp".
Of course, that technical meaning gets lost in wider circulation, although I don't think I've ever come across it being used in this sense myself.

John

[goofy]

"irradiate" also means "radiate"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irradiate

[Wes Phillips]

My wife, a linguist, proposes "disrregardless," which, being a triple negative, means regardless, but is so much classier.

[Nancy]

Wes: Assume you meant "disirregardless"? Or "disregardless"? Either way, yeah: hella classy, as we say here in Oakland.

Goofy: "Unravel" is a good example of an unecessary prefix that fills a felt need. It's easy to forget whether "ravel" means "to knit" or "to take apart." (There's an online community for knitters called Ravelry, btw.)

But I was thinking more about words whose prefixed forms already have specific meanings. Are the meanings of "infamous" and "penultimate" on their way to obsolescence? "Pen-" (from Latin paene = "about") is definitely an odd prefix in English; not too many examples of it. (Penumbra?)

[Nick Tata]

The word, "malfunction" ; "fail to operate normally", as in the case of the famous (infamous?) costume at the Superbowl, might be a kind of abuse in that it really doesn't leave us a clue as to what happened or why. "The computer malfunctioned." Did the malfunctioning computer destroy the world or lose a font?

[goofy]

I think the "un" of "unravel" is redundant, but it's not unnecessary.

"But I was thinking more about words whose prefixed forms already have specific meanings."

I'm not sure what you mean.

[tiffany]

flammable and inflammable are my personal favorites.

while it's better described as a compound word, the "over" in "overabundance" also drives me batty.

[Nancy Friedman]

Goofy: Penultimate's specific meaning is "next to last." In using it to mean "really, really ultimate," are we losing a word for "next to last"?

Ditto for "infamous." Is it being redefined to mean "really, really famous"?

Are all prefixes becoming perceived as synonyms for "super"? (Hyperbole, but you get my drift, I hope.)

[goofy]

Oh, I get it. Well, it would fit with the notion that we use prefixes for emphasis.

[John Russell]

I might have misunderstood, but I think the Health & Safety brigade decided that 'inflammable' (from 'inflame') was an infamous word because too many illiterates thought it indistinguishable from 'non-flammable'; with inflammable consequences. So, some thirty years back, H&S coined 'flammable'.

Although I'm not fond of H&S Officers, in this case I'll not argue they were incorrect.

'Abundance' and 'overabundance' are two distinct words ('many' and 'too many') and, though often used in a rather flowery manner, I can't see a problem.

As I've always understood, 'irradiate' and 'radiate' have two distinct and very useful meanings. 'Radiation' is what an object gives out. 'Irradiation' is what is received by an object.

Last: If the 'un' in 'unravel' is considered redundant, what am I going to say the next time my garden hose gets ravelled up? [And yes, I use that exact phrase.]

[goofy]

ah, I said that the 'un' in 'unravel' was redundant, but not unnecessary. There's a difference. In "those three cats", plurality is marked 3 times. Redundant, but necessary.

[Barry Nordin]

While perhaps not entirely on point, I've noticed (especially on TV court shows) that people emphasizze their actions by such phrases as "I then proceeded to leave the house," instead of "I left the house." It may be that the legal setting makes verbosity essential in their minds, although I've heard the same turn of phrase elsewhere.

[Dianna]

I am learning to knit. I have taken the same scarf apart at least five times. I think I can safely say it has been unraveled. Or would unravel to mean simply to knit up again?

[Nancy Friedman]

@Dianna: "Ravel" and "unravel" are a unique word pair in that they are synonyms AND antonyms. Also, "ravel" can mean its own opposite (like "cleave"). Read more: http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20010302

English is so much fun. I imagine knitting is, too.

[Jeri Reilly :: Word Matters]

Flammable /inflammable can be dangerously confusing.