It’s fun to play with pairs of words that have opposite prefixes like FORE- and AFTER-. They could be the subject for a humorous Toastmasters speech. Back on February 12, 2021 I had similarly blogged about Playing with words: PRE- or POST-.
As shown above in a table, we can easily come up with a half-dozen pairs like forebear/afterbear, forelife/afterlife, foremost/aftermost, forenoon/afternoon, forethought/afterthought, and foreword/afterword. Afterbear is obscure; I’ve never heard it used.
And we also can come up with another eight pairs that are ‘missing after’: forearm/afterarm, forecast/aftercast, foreclose/afterclose, forefather/afterfather, forefront/afterfront, foreground/afterground, forerunner/afterrunner, forestall/afterstall.
The forearm also is called the lower arm, and what is above the elbow is the upper arm rather than the afterarm. We are very interested in a forecast of the weather, but not so much in an aftercast. Real estate can be foreclosed on but not afterclosed. Afterfront sounds silly, and afterground instead is background. Afterrunner is a single word that could describe a chase vehicle usually called a police interceptor. Toyota makes a sport utility vehicle called the 4Runner. All eight words are shown above in a table.
A drawing of an arm came from Wikimedia Commons.
No comments:
Post a Comment