akilter

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:04 PM -0400 8/26/08, Wilson Gray wrote:
>FWIW, I'm fully persuaded by Larry and Mark. And it strikes me that,
>given "out of kilter," "akilter" ought to mean "in kilter."

Exactly, but only to the extent that "unthaw" ought to mean 'freeze'
and "unloosen" 'tighten'.  And that's not even getting into
"irregardless".

LH

>
>But, of course, you never know.
>
>-Wilson
>
>On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 12:53 PM, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>>  Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>  Poster:       Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>
>>  Subject:      Re: akilter
>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>  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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>>  The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
>
>
>--
>All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
>come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>-----
>-Mark Twain
>
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