Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth
In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.
A-dept or a-DEPT?
In Which Our Intrepid Blogger Indulges in a Shameless Display of Word-Geekery
and
Reveals Hidden Bardic Secrets
with
Handy User's Guide to Getting It Right
at least
Much of the Time
There's an anomalous class of words in English that mean one thing when stressed on the first syllable, and another when stressed on the second.
Words like adept, consort, present.
There are roughly 120 of these “bisexual” words in the English lexicon. All are bisyllabic. Virtually all come to English from French; virtually all originated in Latin as particle + verb.
They're the nightmare of those trying to learn English, and they manage to trip up even fluent native speakers on a regular basis.
If there's an official grammarian's name for this class of words, I don't know what it is. I call them “dual-stress homographs.” For the truly shameless, there's a list below of examples that I've collected over the years.
Here's a quickie rule-of-thumb for telling which stress is which.
In most cases, the noun is stressed on the first syllable (AD-dress), and the verb (or, sometimes, adjective) on the second (ad-DRESS). It's interesting that it's the verbs, rather than the nouns, that retain the original French stress (French favors last-syllable stress); make of it what you will.
In fine, you have to be a-DEPT to be an A-dept.
absent, abscess, abstract, access, addict, address, adept, adult, affect, ally, annex, attribute, august
buffet
collect, combat, commune, compact, complex, compound, compress, concert, concrete, conduct, confine, conflict, conserve, console, consort, construct, content, contest, contract, contrast, converse, convert, convict, convoy
decrease, default, defect, defense, detail, detour, digest, discharge, discourse, discount, dispatch
entail, entrance, escort, excess, excise, exploit, export, extract
ferment, finance, forbear
impact, import, impress, imprint, incense, incline, increase, insult, intrigue, inverse, invert, invite
minute
object, obverse, occult, offense
perfect, perfume, permit, pervert, presage, present, pretense, proceed, process, produce, progress, project, protest, purport, purpose
rebel, rebound, recall, recap, recess, recoil, record, recount, redo, redress, reflex, refund, refuse, regress, reject, relapse, relay, remount, repeat, research, resource, retail, retake, retard, retort, rewrite, romance
secret, subject, survey, suspect
torment, transfer, transport, tribune
upset
Above: Yury Shakov, Russian Tarot of St. Petersburg
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