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Certain words have a connotation of a level or degree of the idea. For example: worthless is worth-less, the quality is “worth” and the level or degree is low. Another example: eventful is event-full, the action is “event” and the level is high.

I like to take words at face value. And the same with suffixes. The suffix -less should mean less or lower, -some should be medium, and -ful (or -full) should mean more or higher.

And then, because English is so convoluted, a lot of words use those suffixes in the wrong way.

“Awesome” is the one I like for an example of how wrong it is. For this set of words, the quality of awe can have three modifiers to indicate little awe (unimpressive), much awe (impressive), or a moderate amount of awe (umm, pressive). In my world, these would be aweless, aweful, and awesome. But for some reason, “awesome” means full of awe, and “awful” does not mean full of awe, and no one uses “aweless”.

Other candidate: “ruthless” which means lacking ruth. If we take “ruth” to mean “pity”, then someone who is very compassionate should be called “ruthful”. And an average person could be ruthsome.

Another one: “winsome” which means a high level of attractive appearance. It should be “winful”, and someone ugly or mean could be called “winless”.

There are other words with the wrong suffix, but I’ll leave the rest of those as an exercise for the reader.

Except this last one, which doesn’t fix the category because it’s a prefix.

“Extraordinary” – technically, “extra” means outside of, like extraterrestrial. But my first thought is usually that it should mean “more ordinary”, like an extra helping of ordinariness. What I’d like to see is the use of its opposite “intraordinary”. And while we’re at it, how about some extramural sports in college?

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