Orphaned Negatives

Posted on May 28, 2026 by RegenAxe

An orphaned negative or unpaired word is a word that contains a negative prefix or suffix (like un-or dis-) but lacks a corresponding positive counterpart in everyday use. It is not to be confused with a negative of orphans. These words feel like they should have an antonym, but the base word has fallen out of use over time. According to AI, orphaned negatives can also be one of those shoeboxes of old photos, where the prints have become separated from their negatives and one is left with a jumbled mess, but leaving AI aside let’s stick with the first definition.

In the July 1994 New Yorker, author Jack Winter offered a humorous take on orphaned negatives in his article, How I Met My Wife. It is written using orphaned negatives. Its opening paragraph demonstrates this tongue-in-cheek linguistic gimmick:

It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party, I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate. I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array.

Tomorrow, I’ll delve into the potential link between phone use and population decline and also drooling in your sleep. Is it normal to drool in your sleep? Every day your mouth produces between a liter to a liter-and-a-half of saliva that has to go somewhere. Why not your pillow?

Raindrop’s Pitter-Patter Pattern

Posted on February 10, 2024 by RegenAxe

My three favorite things are eating my family and not using commas.

An ode to the lowly comma. Grammar snobs are patronizing, pretentious, censorious and a bunch of other stuff. Oh, and also probably racist too. This is because most people who correct other’s language are older and white. And please, don’t get me started on Oxford commas. These people even have their own national day, National Punctuation Day (September 24th), but they feel that everyday should be their celebrated holiday and all should pay homage their wisdom. They end up pounding their rules for writing so hard that one ends up with nothing but word-smithereens. Does punctuation really even matter? Writing has been around for thousands of years, while punctuation is a relatively modern invention, maybe even just a passing fad. In the sentence, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, is this a statement about a murderous dinner guest? Or, sans comma, does it describe the diet of a panda? Clarity of meaning is often upheld as an ideal, but life is messy and sometimes works better with some ambiguity. It helps to lubricate the soul and makes living even possible.

LA where a hooker is only a role from stardom, and vice, as they say, versa.

The 10 Grossest English Words

Posted on February 4, 2022 by RegenAxe

It started raining on Tuesday, which turned to sleet overnight. It continued to sleet most of Wednesday. Wednesday night and all-day Thursday it snowed. In the end, I measured seven inches, which is seven more inches than we’ve seen all winter. Yesterday, during the day, a young man knocked on the door and offered to shovel our walks. For twenty bucks, it seemed like a deal. He did a good job, but since the snow kept falling afterwards, in a few hours, it was hard to tell that anything had been shoveled at all. Later Anne and I walked to the grocery store. The headline on the front page of the paper was an order to “Stay off the roads.” It was accompanied with a rather humorful photo of some fool motoring his moped down a rather snowy roadway.

Unfortunately, the half-plowed roads were the only decent place to walk. We tried walking on Clayton, but a pair of passing County snowplows made us jump back and we retreated to the less well plowed neighborhood streets that were also much less trafficked. Most stores were closed, and the grocery store was only operating at reduced hours. We got a few things and trudged back home again, managing not to land on our butts. The storm sewer that runs beneath Ethel Walk normally looks rather gross, but with a fresh blanket of snow, it looked almost beautiful. Today, I shoveled the walks again and dug out the car. After much egregiously idling I was able to get the ice mostly off its windows and now it is ready to go, except that we’re not going anywhere now.

Yesterday, on HuffPo I spied an article from the language learning website Preply. This article identified the ten grossest words in English, as determined by a poll. Almost all of the words have to do with bodily fluids. Most women found pus to be the grosses word, while most men disliked seepage the most. Jane’s favorite, phlegm, is sitting proudly in the number two spot.

Pus – A white/yellowish liquid formed on the site of a wound or infection.
Phlegm – liquid secreted by mucous membranes.
Seepage – The slow escape of a liquid or gas through porous material.
Moist – Sightly damp, wet, or humid.
Splooge – An abrupt discharge of fluid.
Fester – Of a wound or sore that becomes septic; suppurate.
Mucus – A slick secretion produced by and covering mucous membranes.
Ooze – Fluid slowly trickle or seep out of something.
Putrid – Organic matter decaying or rotting and emitting a fetid smell
Curd – A dairy product obtained by curdling milk. Can substitute soy.

Wordplay

Posted on September 11, 2018 by RegenAxe

California Poppies

I’m a sucker for wordplay. Here’s a few from a list that I found on Buzzfeed:

The past, the present and the future walk into a bar. It was tense.
Hyphenated, non-hyphenated, how ironic.
i before e, except when your foreign neighbor Keith received eight counterfeit beige sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters. Weird.
Doctor: I’m afraid that you have onomatopoeia.
Patient: Oh no! What is that?
Doctor: It’s exactly what it sounds like.
What if women had apostrophes instead of periods?
They’d be even more possessive and prone to contractions.
Teacher: Name two pronouns.
Student: Who? Me?
Let’s eat Grandma.
Let’s eat, Grandma.
Commas save lives.
An oxymoron walked into a bar and the silence was deafening.
Today, I will be as useless as the “g” in lasagna.
A dangling modifier walks into a bar. After finishing a drink, the bartender asks it to leave.
I’m so adjective, I verb nouns.

Don’t Feed the Plants!

Posted on April 19, 2015 by RegenAxe

Variscite in Google Earth

“Little Shop of Horrors” played at the high school last night. This is the first musical that they have performed in ten years, since Dave was a senior there. That show was “Godspell” and Dave was part of the crew. “Little Shop” was great! The singing was great! The cast was great! Major singing props to the Audrey sisters, Audrey (Jazmen Bell) and Audrey II (Natalee Clemons). A final shout out to Orin (Maxx Diebold) for stealing all his scenes, just don’t act like that in school. Oh wait, too late! Anne is going to the dentist this week, but probably won’t ask the dentist what he thinks of Orin. The play is set in a little flower shop in LA’s Skid Row. Dan lives in the flower district on the edge of Skid Row. Coincidence? I think not. Just, don’t feed the plants Dan.

You’ve got to have art
Lots and lots and lots of art
Oh, it’s fine to be a techie of course
But keep that old horse
Before the cart
First you’ve got to have art
– With apologies to “Damn Yankees”

Today was a rainy day. So, to make the day brighter, we decorated. We had already moved most of the furniture back into place, so today was all about throwing-up art onto our pristine new walls. By the end of the day, we hadn’t made a whole lot of tangible progress, we only hung one piece, the mask from Jay and Carl, but we laid a lot of groundwork. A key part of this was the framing of four new pieces. We still have three more to go though. One thing that I learned was that there may not be much of a difference in the appearance, between cheap frames and more expensive ones, but the more expensive ones are way easier to put together.

Signalize is a word. It is a verb. We saw it on a traffic sign today, which was basically telling us that if you can’t hack the frigging traffic, go to the other parking lot exit, which has been signalized. The traffic sign used signalize as an adjective, “For signalized intersection [go this way]”, which Anne said was a frigging gerund and I said what? Anne thought that a gerund is when you use a verb as an adjective, which was what the sign did, but actually it is when you use a verb as a noun. This led us to a discussion of frigging. Is it ever more than just a euphemism for the F-word? I guess not, because it comes from the Old English word frīgan, which means to love. OBTW, frig is the gerund for frigging. So, if you want to emphasize a point, without being too offensive, you could signalize it with frigging, like in “a frigging gerund”. Clear?

Blog Along

Posted on January 30, 2015 by RegenAxe

LA Wall Art

Fab blogger, Andrew Sullivan of The Dish fame, announce this week that he would soon be hanging up his hat. He will have logged some fifteen years in the blog-o-sphere.I’m surprised that I’ve lasted as long as a blogger as I have, but that is not even half of what Sullivan has done. Not that I’m planning on quitting anytime soon. I like writing and I enjoy showing off my photographs. Likewise, I’m not ready to quit this blog to write the great American novel, like he is. Sometimes writing every day is a chore, but mainly it is an avenue for my expression. I began this endeavor with both gusto and hubris. A couple of years into it though, I realized that I was mining my life’s experiences at an unsustainable rate. I think that this is a common discovery of would be bloggers and is a common reason for quitting. You just run out of things to say. I began in a rush with many of my friends and relatives. Unfortunately, most of these fellow bloggers have quit. Fortunately for me though, I’ve developed the blogging equivalent of fracking. This blog has actually altered my lifestyle. I now go out and do more than I used to do, just to have something to blog about.

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Category Archives: Words