akilter

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:37 AM -0400 8/27/08, Marc Velasco wrote:
>no mention of _off kilter_ ?

Speaking of which:

Her glossy red locks were a little unkilter.
Even in death my heart will be unkilter.
Hollow but soothing synths are battered about by minimal and
sometimes unkilter beats.
While the evening did have a slightly unkilter beginning,...

"unkilter" may be another influence on "akilter", although the latter
is much more frequent.

LH
>
>On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 3:07 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 Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 1:53 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
>>  wrote:
>>
>>  >                  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.
>>
>>  What's the base of "akimbo"? OED etym:
>>
>>  [Deriv. unknown. Prof. Skeat (Append.) gives a suggestion of
>>  Magnussen, comparing the earliest known forms with Icel. keng-boginn,
>>  -it, 'crooked' (Vigfusson), lit. 'bent staple-wise, or in a horse-shoe
>>  curve'; other suggestions are a cambok in the manner of a crooked
>>  stick (ME. cambok, med.L. cambuca [long u], see CAMMOCK); a cam bow in
>>  a crooked bow. None of these satisfies all conditions.
>>   The difficulty as to a-cambok, a cam bow, is that no forms of the
>>  word show cam-, from which the earliest are the most remote. The Icel.
>>  keng-boginn comes nearer the form, but there is no evidence that it
>>  had the special sense of a-kimbo, and none that the latter ever had
>>  the general sense of 'crooked.' It also postulates an early Eng.
>>  series of forms like *keng-bown or *keng-bowed, *keng-bow, *akengbow,
>>  quite unknown and unaccounted for.]
>>
>>  --
>>  Mark Mandel
>>
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