11 July 2024

"Malice prepense" and other postpositive adjectives


This week I gave a "goodbye read" to a book I've had for some 50 years.  While doing so I paused at this curious passage:
"At this distance no one can say how much of what Lady Caroline accomplished represented malice prepense and how much was a quick response to opportunity."
The definition of "premeditated" was implicit in the context of the passage, but while looking up confirmation in online sources,  I encountered these passages:
"Malice aforethought is a direct translation of the Law French term malice prépensée, so the adjective follows the noun as in French."  "prepense is usually used postpositively."
As an English major now in my elder years, it's a bit embarrassing to see the word "postpositive" for the first time (even though in my career I responded to innumerable "code blue" alerts).  As it turns out there are an abundance of "postpositive" adjectives - I just didn't know the classification term.
A postpositive adjective or postnominal adjective is an adjective that is placed after the noun or pronoun that it modifies, as in noun phrases such as attorney general, queen regnant, or all matters financial. This contrasts with prepositive adjectives, which come before the noun or pronoun...

In some languages (Spanish, Welsh, Indonesian, etc.), the postpositive placement of adjectives is the normal syntax, but in English it is largely confined to archaic and poetic uses (e.g. "Once upon a midnight dreary", as opposed to "Once upon a dreary midnight") as well as phrases borrowed from Romance languages or Latin (e.g. heir apparent, aqua regia) and certain fixed grammatical constructions (e.g. "Those anxious to leave soon exited")

Recognizing postpositive adjectives in English is important for determining the correct plural for a compound expression. For example, because martial is a postpositive adjective in the phrase court-martial, the plural is courts-martial...
Herewith some examples - tons more at Wikipedia and other online sources.  In food: spaghetti bolognese; chicken korma, whiskey sour. In titles:  professor emeritus, attorney general, consul general, postmaster general, surgeon general, astronomer royal, notary public, poet laureate, president-elect, prime minister-designate... In organizations: Alcoholics Anonymous, Amnesty International, Weather Underground.  Titles of works: Apocalypse Now, "Bad Moon Rising", Body Electric, Brideshead Revisited, Chicken Little, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Hannibal Rising, Hercules Unchained, House Beautiful, Jupiter Ascending, The Life Aquatic, A Love Supreme, The Matrix Reloaded, Monsters Unleashed, Orpheus Descending, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Prometheus Unbound, "The Road Not Taken", Time Remembered, Enemy Mine.

The book itself I am now done with, and I've listed my copy on eBay.  It was special to me for many years because the author, John Chapman, was a personal friend and my attending physician during my medical training in Texas.  He was a classic academic physician who had also developed a personal interest in the poet Lord Byron, and had extensively researched Byron's life and times, specifically to address the question of whether Byron committed incest with his half-sister Augusta Leigh [TLDR answer: no.  The accusations were most likely malicious rumors started by a jilted other woman].  The book also has a detailed analysis of Byron's death at an early age, concluding that the original reports of cerebral malaria etc were nonsense, but that Byron may have had an intracranial arteriovenous malformation that occasionally leaked, causing his lifetime of intermittent headaches, before finally rupturing fatally on his last visit to Greece.  

This is a scholarly book, not a general interest book for the casual reader.  I didn't donate it to our library because its narrow focus and esoteric subject matter puts it at risk for being pulped, and IMHO it deserves a better fate.  I'm hoping that via eBay it will find its way into the hands of an interested scholar.

5 comments:

  1. The plural of whiskey sour is whiskies sour? I think that is a different thing, combining multiple whiskies in one drink. I think whiskey sours is clearer.

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    Replies
    1. It IS "whiskey sours" - but not for the reason you think. In this usage, "sour" is a noun, not an adjective, so it takes the plural in normal fashion -

      https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sour#Noun

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    2. Then I am confused by the text. Are these not intended as examples postpositive?

      Herewith some examples - tons more at Wikipedia and other online sources. In food: spaghetti bolognese; chicken korma, whiskey sour.

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    3. I just copypasted examples I found on the 'net, but after researching anon's query, I've gone back and x'd out the "whiskey sour" one. I assume the others are true postpositives.

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  2. Not by a "jilted other woman," by an other woman scorned. A nice bracketing of pre- and postpositive adjectives.

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