« Inside Joke Explanation Thread II |
Main
|
"Butcher of Beslan" Dead As Zarqawi »
July 10, 2006
Words That Are Only Used With Other Words
In one of Lawrence Block's ten billion detective books, I think, he had his characters musing about words that are only used with other words. The specific example was "ulterior." 99% of the time when "ulterior" is used, it's followed by "motive."
It's sort of been demoted from a freestanding word to a part of a two-component word.
Feisty was noting that "wreaked" is almost always used with a follow-up word like "violence" or "mayhem." And the other day I was just talking about a word that's pretty much only used in combination with another, though I forget it now.
There are a lot of these not-really-words-anymore words.
Yeah, I got nothing.