akilter

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:09 PM -0400 8/25/08, Laurence Horn wrote:
>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.
>

I forgot "akimbo", which has the same morpho-onset as "akilter".  And
"awry" is another morphosemantic relative.

LH

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