Some would opine that, given the astonishing dearth of prefixes in the foregoing post, the following saturation thereof was inevitable. In such cases, an appeal to a law of statistics might even be made. Far be it from me to decry such a proposition. Whatever part the ineluctable has played however, we will proceed to ask the question: which word is the king (or queen), nay, the sovereign of all suffixes?
The criterion I submit as being decisive here is the number of possible prefixes to which a given candidate can be affixed. As an apposite example, we shall first examine the suffix of suffix: "fix". Within the family of affixes alone, we find at least ten official prefixes (see note (1) below), and a quick search will uncover a few of their more controversial cousins: subfix, unfix, reaffix, antefix, and arguably even crucifix.
Can we beat 15? Wikipedia comes to our aid again with a fairly (though not fully) comprehensive list of English (derivational) prefixes (see (2)), which provides us with a glimpse of the potential powerhouses we might yet find, whilst whetting our neologistic appetites as we see the part we may play in becoming suffixual 'king'-makers. Thus far my Warwickian aspirations have led me to propose that the position may well belong to that great poser which has interposed itself liberally into this very sentence's composition. With prefixual powers well into the thirties (3), I challenge the reader who opposes this supposition not merely to impose their own presupposition, but rather to expose the inadequacies by juxtaposing another with the strength to depose and dispose of the alleged pretender.
In fact, the task is greater than I have admitted, for I have since found another suffix, whose metaphorical bootstraps "pose" is quite unworthy of tying. This new ruler is synonymous with a severely solipsistic autonomy, or at least with its homonym, as it almost doubles its predecessor in suffixability (4). We'll no doubt delve further into its riches in future posts (see the forthcoming homage to the contronym (itself the synonym of antagonym and autoantonym)), but for now it only remains to return our new leader to relative anonymity, with little time for eulogy, in light of the surely unsurpassable supremacy of the word to end (and begin?) all words: the Word itself (5). No analogy is possible without tautology, and we are left with two mindbending questions from our new master: is autology autology? Worse still, is heterology heterology? (6) Such an ominous enquiry calls for a prompt end to this my far from augural post. For the prefix has returned, with a prefixation for avengeance.
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affix#Positional_categories_of_affixes
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefix#List_of_English_derivational_prefixes
(3) http://www.scrabblefinder.com/ends-with/pose/
(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-onym#Words_that_end_in_-onym
(5) http://www.morewords.com/ends-with/logy/
(6) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autological_word#Paradox
No comments:
Post a Comment