These Times

You often read or hear about a crowd or the appearance of someone’s hair being “unruly,” but you rarely encounter a “ruly crowd” or “ruly hair.” “Ruly” is an example of what’s called a “lost positive,” a word that has lost its use in our daily language. Other examples of lost positives are “couth,” “ept,” “whelmed” and “gruntled.”

You can lead a cat to a scratching post, but you can’t make it itch.

We have the word “reflection” — an image created by light being cast on another image — but we don’t have a word for the thing that causes the reflection. It’s the same with the word “echo.”

When so...