A cellany of incromulent words

[drdoug]

English is full of prefixes. A fun game is to remove a negative prefix, or letters that are the same as a negative prefix, to give you a humorous new word that means the opposite of the original. This has been going on since at least the C19th, and probably before. So you could describe a surprisingly well-mannered and cultured provincial person as

Comments

[makyo]

Gormful: unusually intelligent and alert.
Implain: to describe something in a manner that makes it less clear. (This one was coined by a former housemate in York.)

I once went to a talk by China Mieville in which he used the word "abcanny": Not just uncanny, but actively eschewing canniness.

[drdoug]

Excellent all. I particularly like "implain", although the other two are good.

[cartesiandaemon]

Magic:The Gathering has a card "Whelming Wave", which is probably where I learned that "whelm" was a word from. According to the dictionary, it means overcome, engulfed, etc, especially by the sea. I think. I'm not sure about the sea connotation.

But I like to think of it as "bowled over, like, a normal amount for the situation, neither over not under" :)

[venta]

I certainly use "kempt", though I don't know if the dictionary would back me up (Google thinks it would); I've heard "sequitur".

It's quite surprising how many words (like exorable, sipid, advertent...) I read and thought "I use those!" before realising I was just confusing them with their usual forms.

I like itary, though.

[venta]

Ooh, and you missed a favourite of mine: corrigible.

[moral_vacuum]

Tegral - something extraneous or unnecessary.  "This  is tegral to achieving our objective".

Tegumented - something that has been skinned,  for example St Bartholemew.

[venta]

Not being familiar with the tegumentary state of St Bartholomew, I just went to consult Wikipedia. I am intrigued to discover that St Bartholomew's miracles revolve around making objects (principally statues of himself) appear heavier or lighter than they actually are!