While in Venice, a lethargic game of Contact morphed into a competition to see who could name the best 'A' words with quality determined by general consensus (ex: assuage, azalea). Then we struck upon something interesting: some 'A' words can be separated into "A" and "the-rest-of-the-word" where the latter is still a word. (ex: aspire = a + spire). This started a new game - find as many such words as possible.
Notes:
- Phonetic answers are okay. For example, "abalone" is not quite "a" + "bologna," but still notable.
- A word of the form "A" + "double consonant" + "stuff" is completely acceptable. For example, "acclimate."
- Extra points for words that are:
- more than 2 syllables
- pronounced very differently when concatenated than when separated
- Other letters are possible (ex: bemused, beaches (that's be + aches))
Have fun! Leave answers in the comments.
Webpages that may or may not be relevant:
I LOVE IT!! Shocker, right?
ReplyDeleteI once did some linguistics inquiring into the prepositional qualities of the a prefix and how generative it was (and whether it wasn't just a contraction of "at"). Which is to say: you can say it was across the thing, or aslant the thing, and even above the thing (but what's bove?), but could you say it was adax the thing, if dax meant... well, I don't remember the details, but "adax" was definitely in there.
And I read a book recently in which the author used so many "a" adjectives/postpositions that I started keeping a list - aflutter, atwitter, aglow... but I can't remember what book it was and I can't check right now because I'm abroad, Aboston, abed, not ahome, adesk.
As I was reading this post, before I made it to the comments, I was thinking, "Erica MUST have commented already. Wonder what words she's come up with."
ReplyDelete