Gratitude Post - February 28, 2023

I'm grateful for prefixes & suffixes!

When I was in elementary school we were asked what our favourite words were.  One person said "moist", to the consternation of everyone else in the group.  Others pulled out words like "knock" or "pterodactyl", words with silent letters.  I put forward the word "thus", but then a friend of mine said "antidisestablishmentarianism".  And that word stuck with me.  My friend didn't know the meaning of it at the time, so I took it upon myself to search for the meaning.  You may have heard of a disestablishmentarian, or someone who favours the disestablishment of church and state.  Conversely, antidisestablishmentarianism is the opposition to withdrawing state support from a church.  The presence of the double negative drastically changes the implications of the word.  But regardless of what the word means, it's the power of prefixes and suffixes that really intrigues me when I think about antidisestablishmentarianism.  

The root word of antidisestablishmentarianism is establish.  There are two prefixes, anti- and dis-, and three suffixes, -ment, -tarian, and -ism.  Together these modifications to the root word change the meaning and implications of the word, reversing the expected definition, and providing an entirely new word.  It's amazing what a prefix or suffix can do, and then the combination of them together ... the English language is amazing!