akilter

[Mark Mandel]

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.) ISTM that "awry" is
an especially good fit for a semantic (mis)model.

--
Mark Mandel

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