For the Love of Affixes and Prepositions… Part 10.1 “Ob”

[This post represents a relaunch of my ongoing series of posts for poets and language-lovers on the beauty and history of English prepositions. It now includes affixes.]

Words that end in –ob tend to be coarse. ‘Gob’ is a vulgar word for mouth. When I was a kid, there used to be a kind of sweet called a gob-stopper. As the labored assonance and alliteration suggest, it was a large hard spherical chunk of candy, a treat preferred primarily by yobbish boys. Many of these gob-stopper-chomping boys have probably since grown up to be slobs—the kind of obese middle-aged men who overeat, underdress and lounge around uselessly on the sofa most of the day.

Protesters turn into a mob when things turn ugly, even when they are posh snobs. A lob is a clumsily struck ball in sport. I could go on, through knob and rob, all the way to Steve Jobs.

These are all vulgar, very English words, grubbed up by peasants from the linguistic dirt of piecework on sodden farms on the fens, scooped up by sailors from the interlingual bilge sloshing around in the bottom of boats.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the social scale, schoolmen skilled in Latin, logic, grammar and rhetoric were busy in their ivory towers inventing new erudite words beginning with ob- to much the same effect.

Whereas –ob as a quasi-suffix, coda or rhyme has weeviled its way up from the gutter in the English lexicon and still bears the hallmarks of its insalubrious origins, ob- as a prefix was handed down from Latin urbi et orbi through the august institutions of the grammar school and the Anglo-Catholic church.

But the obtuse flavor of such words, if veiled, remains essentially the same.

Obstacles, obstructions, obduracy, obstreperous behavior are obviously things—albeit abstract ones—that bump up against us, thump or oppose us and generally get in our way.

It is easy to overlook the importance of these seemingly disruptive words and the objectionable things to which they refer. But many of them have gone on to play a major role in the development of a modern objective form of science based primarily on empirical observation.

The upcoming second part of this post will examine the weird way in which the upstart obs of this world have in fact shaped our modern civilized age.