akilter

[Wilson Gray]

Little-known fact: back in the day, there was a protocol for devising
a codeword to apply to material to be stamped "SECRET (Codeword]." The
codeword had to consist of three consonants and two vowels. By
coincidence, WRT this thread, the default codeword was "kimbo." Hence,
"SECRET KIMBO" was stamped onto Russian-English dictionaries and such
miscellaneous tools of the trade to prevent them from being
"liberated."

-Wilson

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 1:53 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: akilter
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 12:53 PM -0400 8/26/08, Mark Mandel wrote:
>>On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 11:09 PM, Laurence Horn
>><laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>>
>>>  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.
>>
>>Oh, sure, the poster was off-target on "alpha privative". (That wasn't
>>my comment, it was part of a reply in the source.)
>
> I realized that.  But it's actually an interestingly subtle puzzle.
> I'm wondering whether the formation and analysis of "akilter" as
> negative/privative through influence of akimbo, awry, askew, astray,
> etc. (all of course involving the OE adverbial a- rather than the
> Greek privative) is parallel in a way to what happens with un-verbs,
> where the effect is to assure a negative ("helping entropy along")
> meaning whether through reversing a goal-oriented base  ("unfreeze",
> "untighten") or redundantly reinforcing a source-oriented base
> ("unthaw", "unloosen").  Similarly with these a- adjectives, the
> meaning ends up approximating 'a bit off', whether by reinforcing the
> base ("akimbo", "awry", etc.) or reversing it ("akilter").  The fact
> that "kilter" is so rare itself doesn't hurt.
>
> LH
>
>>  ISTM that "awry" is
>>an especially good fit for a semantic (mis)model.
>>
>>--
>>Mark Mandel
>>
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