Demolish: Build it and they will come

to unbuild it

If a word begins with de, chances are fair that it’s got something to do with undoing something else. Defrost your freezer and tell me that ain’t so. Or defrock a wayward priest, deflate a tyre, or descend a hill after spending a miserable two hours climbing the damn thing.

In each of those cases, the undoingness is made all the more obvious by your knowing the original word - the freezer must have first got frosted up, the tyre was previously inflated, and as you trudged your dreary way upward, bearing fardels as you grunted and sweated under a weary life¹, you were ascending the hill.

But there are also many words where the original has either fallen into desuetude or never existed as a separate word. Demolish is one, as you can guess from this week’s title. But I could just as well have chosen decide, delay, delegate, deplete, despair, detect, develop or any one of a host of other candidates. Despair, for example, is the Latin sperare - or “hope” - with a de bolted on. If we could transport ourselves back in time, demolish would literally mean “unbuild”, deplete would mean “un-fill”, detect would mean “uncover”, and develop would mean “unwrap” or “unfurl”.

Where the source word is lost to us, we can often detect an undoingness anyway. You don’t need to know that demolish can be traced back to the Latin de + moliri (“build, construct”) to know a reversal of some kind is taking place or that destroy owes a good part of its existence to the Latin struere, “to pile”.

Prefixes like de are a dime a dozen in English. Wikipedia lists 74 of them, while also pointing out that the list - starting with a and ending with xeno - is not exhaustive. So it may surprise you to learn that many languages don’t use prefixes. Some, like Turkish and Finnish, use suffixes to modify words. Tagalog, a Philippine language, uses infixes (within words), while Mandarin relies on word order, tone and additional words to do the job. The languages that do use prefixes generally come from a Latin or Indo-European root and include English, French, Spanish and, wouldn’t you know it?, Swahili.

Here’s another thing about prefixes: they work very differently from suffixes. To get all linguistic-y on you for a moment, prefixes are preformative, which is another way of saying they change the form of the word they’re attached to. You molish a Roman house and then the Gauls invade and demolish it. Yesterday you were happy but today you’re unhappy.

English prefixes always create a new word with a new meaning - they’re what linguists call derivational. Suffixes, on the other hand, are inflectional - they modify words without changing their basic meaning, as in run, running (or inflection, inflectional, for that matter).

De falls into a subset of English prefixes called privative. That is to say they negate or invert the meaning of the stem word (depriving it of its original meaning). Others, all more common than de, include un (from West Germanic), in (Latin) and a (Ancient Greek). De itself comes from Latin, where, as a prefix, its function was to undo or reverse a verb’s action.

Just to complicate things, another possible meaning in Latin was “down”, “off”, “away” and their variants. When you defend yourself from an idiot on social media, you’re not undoing anything - you’re drawing on the Latin defendere, “ward off, protect” from de (“from, away”) + fendere (“to strike, hit, push”).

To complicate things further still, Latin has lumbered us with yet another possible meaning, “down to the bottom, totally, completely”. When you demand that the idiot on social media leave you alone, you’re not merely requesting something of them, you’re making a full-on order (Latin mandare).

Of course none of this really is complicated for fluent English speakers. The language is like a car - we hop into it to get from A to B and rarely give a moment’s thought to what’s going on under the bonnet, and nor do we need to. Which may be just as well, because what is going on under there is anything but the purring of an immaculately designed engine straight out of Nürburgring. It’s a mess; a randomness of parts from factories around the world, each using different specifications and materials, all jammed together by a horde of back-seat drivers who can’t even agree on something as trivial as the Oxford comma. It’s a wonder the damn thing works.

Yet work it does. And what a delightful, definite, undebatable joy that is.

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Bits and specious

The words googol (10¹⁰⁰ or 1 with 100 zeroes after it) and googolplex were invented by a nine year old, who defined a googolplex as 1 followed by “writing zeroes until you get tired”. His uncle, mathematician Edward Kasner, took all the fun out of it by then defining googolplex as 10 to the power of a googol. In so doing, he rendered his nephew’s definition not merely obsolete, but possibly the greatest understatement in human history. If you wrote a googolplex via the zeroes or “until you get tired” method, you’d run out of atoms (roughly calculated at 10⁸⁰) and even available space in the universe long before you got to the last zero.

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The reciprocal of a googolplex (that is, 1 divided by a googolplex) is a googolminex. Dubious mathematical variants on this word are zootzootplex (coined by a precocious and no doubt highly irritating four year old), which is the exponential factorial of the googolplex (don’t ask), and googolmilliplex which I’m not even going to try to define. The study of mathematical variants of googol has been dubbed googology. You’d think googolology would be more natural, but who knows what goes on in mathematicians’ heads?

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There’s a small company in Mountain View, California, that calls its headquarters the Googleplex.

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Here is the complete list of prefixes and their meanings provided by Wikipedia. (Note that numerical prefixes are not included): a- “not”, acro- “high”, allo- “other”, alter- “other”, ante- “prior”, anti- “opposite”, auto- “by oneself or itself”, bi- “two”, co- “together”, cis- “on the same side”, contra- “below”, “against”, counter- “against”, de- “negative, remove”, di- “two”, dis- “negative, remove”, down- “down”, “reduce”, dys- “negative, badly, wrongly”, epi- “upon addition”, “above”, extra- “to a greater extent”, “beyond”, fore- “before”, hemi- “half”,, hexa- “six”, hyper- “beyond”, hypo- “marginal”, “not enough”, ig- “not”, il- “not”, im- “not”, in- “not”, infra- “below”, inter- “between”, intra- “within”, ir- “not”, macro- “large-scale”, “exceptionally prominent”, mal- “unpleasant”, “not”, maxi- “big”, “as big as possible”, meso- “middle”, meta-, “self-referential”, micro- “small-scale”, mid- “middle”, mini- “small”, mis- “bad”, “wrong”, mono- “one”, multi- “many”, “more than one”, non- “no”, “not”, octo- “eight”, over- “excess”, “too much”,, “on top”, pan- “all”, para- “beside”, “beyond”, “related to”, “altered”, penta- “five”, per- “through”, “throughout”, peri- “around”, poly- “many”, post- “after”, pre- “before”, “already”, pro- “on behalf of”, “before”, proto- “first”, “primitive”, “precursor”, pseudo- “false”, “specious”,, quadri- “four”, quasi- “somewhat”, “resembling”, re- “again”, self- “[acting on or by] oneself”, semi- “partial”, “somewhat”, “half”, sub- “below”, super- “above”, “more than”, “great”, supra- “above”, tetra- “four”, trans- “across”, “connecting”, tri- “three”, ultra- “beyond”, “extremely”, un- “not”, “remove”, “opposite”, under- “beneath”, “not enough”, up- “up”, “increase”, xeno- “foreign”.

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Quote of the week

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.
Orson Welles

1. Adapted from a certain soliloquy from Hamlet. A fardel is a package or a burden.