akilter

[Laurence Horn]

At 7:26 PM -0700 8/25/08, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>I love the "a kilter" explanation! BB

There are a few good ones.  Here's another compelling
two-sepereate-words [see below] analysis:

I think you might be combining "a" and "kilter" which could easily
occur in a sentence since kilter is a noun. For a complete definition
and examples, see http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r...

--which might make some sort of sense except that this noun "kilter"
is defined there and elsewhere as 'good condition, proper form,
regular order', and it's a bit tricky to predict how combining an
indefinite article with a noun bearing this meaning yields an
adjective meaning 'out of whack'.  Another poster at the link
suggests:

The meaning is better understood if you look at it as "A-Kilter"
where A is a prefix meaning NOT like asynchronous, asymmetrical,
apolitical, etc. It means NOT Kilter. Hope that helps.

But it's hard to imagine "akilter" as involving the Greek privative
prefix; the Greek derivation gets the morphology/etymology wrong,
while the Old English adverbial a- prefix seems right for the
morphology but gets the semantics backward.  If I were Jerry Cohen
(and perhaps even if I weren't), I'd suggest a blend of "askew" with
"(out of) kilter".  There is actually a family of similar descriptive
terms with meanings in the same family--"astray", "askance",
etc.--and maybe they did somehow attract "akilter" to their perverse
ways.

LH

>
>On Aug 25, 2008, at 7:21 PM, Mark Mandel wrote:
>
>>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>Poster:       Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>
>>Subject:      akilter
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>Just heard this:
>>        It is clear to all of us that something is akilter in this
>>great republic.
>>        Jim Leach at the Democratic Convention, 2008-08-25, about
>>8:02 pm MDT
>>
>>~2330 raw googits after specifying "-kilt". Not in OED or M-W.
>>
>>http://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060808090327AAd2OH5
>>Yahoo! Canada Answers - Is there such a word as AKILTER?
>>
>>A: A kilter is two sepereate words and means all messed up or out of
>>kilter.
>>        Jules, Australia.
>
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