How Long Ago This Now Seems

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The clamor for equal access to locker rooms could render Hillary as irrelevant. 

"Why is the 'mor' in 'Voldemort' so evil-sounding?"

"Sherlock Holmes's mortal nemesis was Professor Moriarty."

Harry Potter's nemesis was Voldemort.

Doctor Who had a nemesis named Morbius. So did Spider-Man. Morbius was also the name of the antagonist in The Forbidden Planet.

Frodo Baggins went through the mines of Moria to get to Mordor, where he met Sauron, who, as great a villain as he was, started out as the lieutenant of Morgoth, the original and darkest villain in the world of Tolkien's Middle Earth.

So what's the deal with "mor"? Is there something to the syllable that suits it for melancholy, darkness, and villainy?

We have to be careful here. There are more words out there that have "mor" that don't carry such dark tones...

But we can say that it has some dark associations available if we want to use them. For starters, the Latin "mor" root (as in moribund and mortal and French words such as morte) refers to death; there is an old Germanic root mora for darkness, which shows up in words such as murky; our modern word murder comes from an Old English word morth for the same; and, of course, a morgue is a place where dead bodies are kept. That's enough to give a familiar ring.

In fact, "mor" may be what is sometimes called a phonestheme: a part of a word that tends to carry a certain connotation not because of etymology or formal definition but just by association. Words that start with "gl" often have to do with light (glow, gleam, glimmer, glitter, glisten, etc.) even though they are not all related historically; similarly, words that start with "sn" often relate to the nose (snoot, sniffle, snot, snore, sneeze, etc.). It doesn't mean that all words with those letters have the meaning in common, but there is a common thread among a notable set of them. READ MORE

Do you have any phonestheme ringing in you ear, you may like to share?
The Week

Word Play

In chemistry, a now antiquated naming system designated different oxidation states of metals using "-ous" for lower and "-ic" for higher. For example, ferrous (Fe²⁺) vs. ferric (Fe³⁺) and cuprous (Cu⁺) vs. cupric (Cu²⁺). The naming system is presumably French in origin because it uses Latin names for the elements and because "-ous" and "-ic" are typical French suffixes (suffices?).

A while ago I wondered whether such word pairs existed outside of chemistry and also whether they reflected degrees of whatever they were modifying. I put the question out there and got some feedback:

Sixty Grit said: harmonious vs. harmonic;

Pete tweeted: numerous and numeric;

Jason tweeted tonous and tonic;

Blake tweeted vampirous and vampiric.

"Tonous" and "vampiric" come up as questionable words. I added generous and generic, tyrannous and tyrannic, and barbarous and barbaric to the list.

Of these pairs, barbarous and barbaric come the closest to what I sought: barbaric sounds slightly more barbarous than barbarous does.

Can you add any word pairs? I will update this post with contributions.