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are your sins cleansed away? notice *your* not mine. |
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sp. Equity. The original "ae" (becoming English "e") became an "i" in the compound form as part of the wider process of vowel-weakening in non-initial syllables, as documented by a certain Professor Niedermann in a periodical which seems not to have made it online yet. |
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In other words, the virtue of "fairness" or "everyone being treated the same" was so important at the time when the word "iniquity" took on its English usage that it was able to stand in for all the virtues, and iniquity, its opposite, for all the vices. Or something like that. |
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Would a church count as a Den of Equity or a Den of
Iniquity? Seeing as only god fearing people go to
church, I'm assuming they have a reason to fear him. |
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Monastic retreats, anyone? |
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Failing would result in complaints, or the "Din of inequity..." |
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Wasn't "Den of Iquity" a character in "Monty Python and the
Haddock of Doom"? |
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You're confusing him with Doug and Dinsdale Piranha. |
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[pertinax], based on what you wrote, a "den of inequity" would be a place where just one type of sin would be getting performed by its occupants. But a den of iniquity is a place where all sins get performed (if you wait long enough, murder will be included). Therefore since I've defined a "den of iquity" as the opposite of a den of iniquity, it must be a different thing from the idea of a "den of equity". |
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There are many fixed expressions that are
negatives of a positive that is never used or never
existed to begin with. Some people call this
phenomenon "lost positives"--you'll find some
examples online if you
search for that. Eg, "gruntled employees".
My recent favorite instance of a lost positive
retroformation is the
recombobulation area that's been created behind
the security checkpoint at a local
airport. |
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+ for //recombobulation// |
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[jutta], yes, English is notorious for its inconsistencies. In this case, the particular inconsistency involves the prefix "in" which usually (but not always) means "not", and sometimes means "negative". So, a word like "inappropriate" means "not appropriate", and a word like "infamous" means "famous in negative way". But of course there are plenty of words that don't cooperate with that "rule", consider "formation" and "information", for example. Or even "flammable" and "inflammable", where the latter means "extra flammable" instead of "not flammable"! |
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And then, of course, there are words that are completely outside the prefix-thing altogether, such as "inferior, inert, iniquity, invade", ... --I simply took one of them and sort-of created a new word using the "rule", heh! |
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And when you're out, you're not inin. |
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