Arnold Zwicky's Blog

A Zippy with the surprising verb inexplicate (in the past tense):

We start with the adjectives perplexing and inexplicable. Perplexing is based on the verb perplex. What, then, is the verb that inexplicable is based on? Obviously, inexplicate, the meaning of which is hard to, um, explicate.

(The semantics of perplexing and inexplicable are, of course, quite different, and the in- of inexplicable is a negative prefix associated with the adjective explicable rather than with the verb explicate. But Bill Griffith understood that.)

This entry was posted on July 22, 2011 at 9:36 am and is filed under Derivation, Linguistics in the comics, Morphology, Playful morphology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.