👔 Coaching | 🎙️Podcast | ⏱️ Stopwatch | ⏰Off The Clock | & Guild | 📚 BooksHappy Saturday! It’s time for the hurdy-gurdy for the wordy nerdy. Bonus content for subscribers who are interested in language. This is made available exclusively to members of the & Guild (our paid tier), and the good news is you can join them — and at a steep discount: As always, the footnotes work better in the app or on the web.
Welcome to “Off the Clock,” a little something that lands somewhere between Timeless & Timely. I send out this fun look at language and words every other Saturday as bonus content. If someone sent this to you, please consider subscribing.
“I’m not unwell, thank you.” — George Carlin, 1981 There’s something reassuring about pairings. Wine and food, cause and effect, light and shadow, are all things that are paired. Pairing means stability, whether we consider airplane wings or table legs. Pairing creates ease of use: scissors, chopsticks, crutches, socks. It’s true in nature, design, and fashion. A pair of something makes it functional and rational. So when we suddenly find ourselves with an unpaired item, it can throw us off. An unpaired word is one that looks it has a related word, but does not.¹ Checking in at the Word OrphanageHow do we end up with these unpaired or orphaned words? Sometimes, one of the words falls out of popular usage and the one we’re left with is the orphan. Other times, it can be created when one word from a pair is borrowed from another language. But the effect is that there are some words and phrases that exist almost exclusively in the negative. What are some examples, you ask? Here’s a smattering. ... Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
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Unpaired Words
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